Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time

Peter Galison

Science

Galison interweaves the histories of Einstein's special relativity and Poincaré's work on synchronizing clocks across the globe, showing how questions of defining simultaneity were both physical and practical. Isaacson, who wrote his own Einstein biography, praises it as a brilliant investigation into how two related discoveries grapple with what it means for events to be simultaneous.