FASTER(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated auhtor of
Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of
change in today’s world.
　　Most of us suffer some degree of “hurry sickness.” a malady that
has launched us into the “epoch of the nanosecond,” a
need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones,
computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours,
minutes, and even seconds being saved, we’re still filling our days
to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities
as eating, sex, and relating to our families. Written with fresh
insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a
harried world not likely to slow down anytime soon.

　　He worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The
New York Times, founded an early Internet portal, the Pipeline,
and wrote three previous books: Chaos, Genius, and
Faster. His latest book Isaac Newton is available
from Pantheon. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with his
wife.

　　Fascinating and disturbing, amusing and informative, Faster is
an eclectic stew combining history, academic research, and
anecdotes drawn from the popular media. –The Boston Globe
　　”Well written and enjoyable. . . . A book that demands your
attention.” –The Christian Science Monitor
　　”Nimble, smart, often funny, and–best of all–fast.” –The New
York Times Book Review — Review

You are in the Directorate of Time. Naturally you are running
late. You hurry past a glass-paned vault in which the world’s
number-one clock is soundlessly assembling each second from nine
billion parts. It looks more like a rack of computers than a clock.
In its core, atoms of cesium vibrate with a goose-stepping pace so
sure, so authoritative, so humbling–but your mind wanders. There
is not a moment to lose. Striding onward, you reach the office of
the director of the Directorate of Time. He is a craggy,
white-haired man called Gernot M. R. Winkler. He glances across the
desk and says, “We have to be fast.”

The directorate, an agency of the United States military, has
scattered dozens of atomic clocks across a calm, manicured hilltop
near the Potomac River in Washington. Armed guards stand watch at a
security gatehouse down below, mainly because the Vice President’s
residence occupies the same grounds. Once past their scrutiny you
can walk alone up the long drive to the stately 150-year-old Naval
Observatory, the first national observatory of the United States.
Long ago a four-foot ball of Charles Goodyear’s Gumelastic rubber
hung from a mast atop the observatory dome and dropped daily at
noon to signal the time. Now the signals come more quickly. The
Master Clock consults with fifty others in separate
climate-controlled vaults–cesium clocks and hydrogen masers
powered by diesel generators and backup batteries. They check off
the seconds as an ensemble and communicate continuously via
fiber-optic cable with counterparts overseas. The clocks monitor
one another, and individual devices can come on or off line as
their performance warrants. Out-of-sync clocks reveal themselves
quickly. Winkler offers an analogy: “It’s like a court of law,
where you have many slightly different stories and one wildly
different story.” When the plausible witnesses are chosen and
assembled, their output is statistically merged, worldwide, at the
Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, outside Paris. The
American contribution is the largest.

The result is the exact time. The exact time–by definition, by
worldwide consensus and decree. The timekeepers at the directorate
like to quote the old saw (Winkler quotes it now): “A man with a
watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.”
Humanity is now a species with one watch, and this is it.

Through most of history, time was fixed by astronomical
reference points–the Earth spins once, call it a day. No more. The
absolute reference has shifted from the stars to the atomic beams
in their vaults. Particles are steadier than planets. Never mind
the uncertainty principle; it is the heavens that cannot be relied
on. Stars drift. The Earth shivers ever so slightly. With the
oceanic tides acting as brakes, the planet slows in its rotation by
fractions of a second each year. These anomalies do matter, in a
time-gripped age. To compensate, the official clocks must every so
often perform a grudging two-step, adding an odd second–a “leap
second”–to the world’s calendar. Most often, leap seconds are
inserted at the close of December 31. The New Year clicks in
sneakily: 11:59:58 p.m., 11:59:59, 11:59:60 (!), 12:00:00 a.m.,
12:00:01. The descendant of the Naval Observatory’s old Gumelastic
rubber ball drops, studded with light bulbs, in Times Square.
Elsewhere, astronomical observatories, television networks, and
time-obsessed computer users make an adjustment to catch the leap
second. Observatories have been known to get the sign wrong,
ruining a night’s sky-watching with the difference between +1
second and -1. As the Earth continues to slow, leap seconds will
grow more common. Eventually we will need one every year, and then
even more. Scientists could have avoided these awkward skips by
choosing instead to adjust the duration of the second itself. Who
would notice? That is what they did, in fact, until 1955. They
defined the second as 1/86,400 of a real day, however long that
was. The second had to lengthen a tiny bit each year. The atomic
clocks were retuned as necessary. This did not trouble most of us,
even subliminally, but it did start to annoy atomic physicists,
because they needed a temporal measuring stick that would not
stretch: come on, a second is a second–give me a real SECOND.

So here is the real second. Here the technologies of speed reach
the ultimate. “Fifty years ago,” Winkler says wistfully–he was a
schoolboy in Austria–“we made measurements of a tenth of a second
from day to day. That was great. Then more and more applications
came in with greater refinements. It is like anywhere in life. When
you have a capability, people find a use for that.

“Submarines have to surface for communications–they have atomic
clocks,” Winkler continues. “Television transmitters have atomic
clocks. If you have two transmitters on the same channel, and you
are between two cities, the picture will go up and down unless they
are on exactly the same frequency. All good television stations
have a rubidium clock.” You are briefly aware of something
incongruous about this exactitude–but the hyperprecision is all
too familiar, all too closely in step with the rhythms of your more
ordinary haunts.

We have reached the epoch of the nanosecond. This is the heyday
of speed. “Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution
has bestowed on man,” laments the Czech novelist Milan Kundera,
suggesting by ecstasy a state of simultaneous freedom and
imprisonment (“He is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both
the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of
time; he is outside time . . .”). That is our condition, a
culmination of millennia of evolution in human societies,
technologies, and habits of mind.

The finicality of the modern timekeepers departs even further
from our everyday experience–a fact cheerfully acknowledged here
at the directorate. Particle physicists may freeze a second, open
it up, and explore its dappled contents like surgeons pawing
through an abdomen, but in real life, when events occur within
thousandths of a second, our minds cannot distinguish past from
future. What can we grasp in a nanosecond–a billionth of a second?
“I tell you,” Winkler says, “it wasn’t on a human scale when we
were measuring time to a millisecond, and now we are down to a
fraction of a nanosecond.” Within the millisecond, the bat presses
against the ball; a bullet finds time to enter a skull and exit
again; a rock plunges into a still pond, where the unexpected
geometry of the splash pattern pops into existence. During a
nanosecond, balls, bullets, and droplets are motionless.

Inhuman though these compressed time scales may be, many humans
crave the precision. Internet users set their computers to update
their clocks according to the directorate’s time signal. The
directorate fields millions of automatic queries each day. By
pinging back and forth across the network, software called
NanoSecond or RightTime or Clockwork or TimeSync or Timeset
can correct for propagation delays along the phone lines between
the atomic clocks and you. Free connections can be made to modems
or to “time servers” with the whimsical pair of addresses,
tick.usno.navy.mil and tock.usno.navy.mil. More crudely, anyone
with a telephone can dial the Naval Observatory’s Master Clock
Voice Announcer, for fifty cents the first minute. The
time-obsessed used to keep their watches accurate to within
seconds; now they keep their computers accurate to within
milliseconds.

Nanosecond precision matters for worldwide communications
systems. It matters for navigation by Global Positioning System
satellite signals: an error of a billionth of a second means an
error of just about a foot, the distance light travels in that
time. One nanosecond–one foot. That is a modern equivalence worth
memorizing. Cellular phone networks and broadcasters’ transmitters
need fine timing to squeeze more and more channels of communication
into precisely tuned bandwidth. The military, especially, finds
ways to use superprecise timing. It is no accident that the
Directorate of Time belongs to the Department of Defense. Knowing
the exact time is an essential feature of delivering airborne
explosives to exact locations–individual buildings, or parts of
buildings–thus minimizing one of the department’s standard
euphemisms, collateral damage.

Few institutions are so intensely focused on so pure a goal.
Keeping the right time brings together an assortment of
technologies and sciences. The directorate’s astronomers study the
most distant quasars–admiring them for their apparent fixedness in
the sky. A favored set of 462 quasars provides as rigid a frame as
can be found. Meanwhile, the directorate has a team of earth
scientists to study the slowing rotation and the occasional
wobble–a problem that comes down to watching the weather, because
the planet’s spin varies each year with the wind blowing on
mountains. In all, the scientists who control the clocks have
achieved a surpassing precision. As the eighteenth century mastered
the measurement of mass, and the nineteenth, with the establishment
of international geodesy, conquered the measurement of distance,
the even ghostlier quantity, time, had to wait for the technologies
of the twentieth century.
The seconds pass here with a consistency that no pair of scales or
rulers can match. The worst distortion that can accumulate, each
day, remains proportionately smaller than a hairsbreadth in the
distance from the Earth to the Sun–the equivalent of one second in
a million years. “This is extremely important,” Winkler says, the
accent of his native Austria breaking through. His hand slashes
through the air like an ax. “We want to be exact.”

So synchronize your watches. Here are the pacemakers, the
merchants of exactitude, the owners of the pulse in the global
circulatory system. When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver’s
watch, that “wonderful kind of engine . . . a globe, half silver
and half of some transparent metal,” they identified it immediately
as the god he worshipped. After all, “he seldom did anything
without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed
out the time for every action of his life.” To Jonathan Swift in
1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We’re
all Gullivers now.

Or are we Yahoos?

Your eyes wander toward Winkler’s wrist–what sort of watch
would satisfy the director of the Directorate of Time?–but you
cannot quite see it, as he asks: “Can you miss a plane by a
millisecond? Of course not.”

He pauses and adds with pride, “I missed one by five seconds
once.”

It has been noted by psychologists and airline managers alike
that some people prefer to arrive at airports in plenty of time,
keeping time to spare, so that they can have time on their hands in
the lounge or kill time in the bar. Others cannot be happy unless
they time their arrival so closely that, having dashed the last
fifty yards to the gate, they race up the ramp, flash their
boarding pass at the flight attendant, and slip into their seat
with the thunk of the aircraft door fresh in their ears. Not a
moment wasted. Perhaps these dashers, always flirting with
lateness, are the victims of what some doctors and sociologists
have named “hurry sickness.” Then again, perhaps it is the
seemingly calm, secretly obsessive early arrivers who suffer hurry
sickness more.

Both types must be seeking peace of mind. One type can relax in
the waiting lounge or even the check-in line, having minimized the
risk of missing a flight. The other can hope to rest assured that
they have minimized a different quantity: wasted time. Airport
gates are not the only places where people like to flirt with
lateness. But in their way they serve as focal points in the modern
world, places where the technology and the psychology of
hurriedness come together. Airport gates are where we contemplate
the miraculous high speeds of air transport and the unmiraculous
speeds associated with getting to air transport. One measure of
twentieth-century time is the supersonic three and three-quarter
hours it takes the Concorde to fly from New York to Paris, gate to
gate. Other measures come with the waits on the expressways and the
runways. Gridlocked and tarmacked are metonyms of our era: to be
gridlocked or tarmacked is to be stuck in place, our fastest
engines idling all around, as time passes and blood pressures
rise.