Dædalus coming up in Dædalus: Dædalus on secularism Nikki Keddie, Martin E. Marty, James Carroll, Henry Munson, & religion Azzam Tamimi, M. Hakan Yavuz, T. N. Madan, Akeel Bilgrami, Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Vali Nasr, John L. Esposito, Jose Casanova, Heba Raouf Ezzat, Spring 2003 Jean Bethke Elshtain, William Galston, Christopher Hitchens, and others Spring 2003: on time on science Alan Lightman, Gerald Holton, Susan Haack, David Pingree, on time D. Graham Burnett Mapping time 5 Peter Pesic, Peter Wolynes, and Robert Schimke David S. Landes Clocks & the wealth of nations 20 Michael Rosbash A biological clock 27 on learning Alison Gopnik, Howard Gardner, Jerome Bruner, Susan Carey, Thomas Gold The physics of past & future 37 Elizabeth Spelke, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Povinelli, Clark Peter L. Galison & Glymour, and Michael Tomasello D. Graham Burnett Einstein, Poincaré & modernity 41 Jennifer M. Groh & on happiness Martin E. P. Seligman, Richard A. Easterlin, Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael S. Gazzaniga How the brain keeps time 56 Anna Wierzbicka, Bernard Reginster, Robert H. Frank, Julia E. Danielle S. Allen How the Greeks kept time 62 Annas, Darrin M. McMahon, and Ed Diener Anthony Grafton Dating history 74 J. Hillis Miller Time in literature 86 on progress Joseph Stiglitz, John Gray, Charles Larmore, Randall Kennedy, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Jagdish Bhagwati, Richard A. Shweder, and Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson Is time running out? others & Marco Verweij The case of global warming 98 Richard Fenn Time’s up: the apocalyptic imagination 108 on human nature Steven Pinker, Bernard Williams, Lorraine Daston, Jerome Kagan, Vernon Smith, Joyce Appleby, Patrick Bateson, Thomas Sowell, poetry Susan Howe from Bed Hangings ii 113 Jonathan Haidt, Richard Wrangham, Donald Brown, and others ½ction Rick Moody Fish Story 118 plus poetry by Lucie Brock-Broido, Les Murray &c.; ½ction by Lee K. Abbott, Joanna Scott &c.; and notes by Nathan Glazer, Robert notes Bernard McGinn on mysticism & art 131 C. Post, Michael Traynor, Jennifer Hochschild, Perez Zagorin, Yi-Fu Tuan on human geography 134 Gerald Early, Daniel Schorr &c. U.S. $13/Canada $16 www.amacad.org Inside front cover: Charles-Guillaume Manière achieved the distinction of maître horloger in 1778, though this striking masterpiece (now the property of the English Crown) dates from the early nineteenth century. The present moment is indicated by the point of the scythe on the globe clock. The knife-edge confrontation between a scythe-wielding father time and a muse, madly at work, who gives him pause, seems to suggest a sculptural invocation of the classical theme ars longa vita brevis. See David S. Landes on Clocks & the wealth of nations, pages 20–26. Photograph from The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ii. James Miller, Editor of Dædalus Phyllis S. Bendell, Managing Editor and Director of Publications Janet Foxman, Assistant Editor D. Graham Burnett, Consulting Editor Board of editors Steven Marcus, Editor of the Academy Russell Banks, Fiction Adviser Rosanna Warren, Poetry Adviser Joyce Appleby (u.s. history, ucla), Stanley Hoffmann (government, Harvard), Donald Kennedy (environmental science, Stanford), Martha C. Nussbaum (law and philosophy, Chicago), Neil J. Smelser (sociology, Berkeley), Steven Weinberg (physics, University of Texas–Austin); ex of½cio: Patricia Meyer Spacks (President of the Academy), Leslie Cohen Berlowitz (Executive Of½cer) Editorial advisers Daniel Bell (sociology, Harvard), Michael Boudin (law, u.s. Court of Appeals), Wendy Doniger (religion, Chicago), Howard Gardner (education, Harvard), Clifford Geertz (anthropology, Institute for Advanced Study), Carol Gluck (Asian history, Columbia), Stephen Greenblatt (English, Harvard), Thomas Laqueur (European history, Berkeley), Alan Lightman (English and physics, mit), Steven Pinker (neuroscience, mit), Diane Ravitch (education, nyu), Richard Shweder (human development, Chicago), Frank Wilczek (physics, mit) Dædalus is designed by Alvin Eisenman Dædalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Design for the hedge maze is by Johan Vredeman de Vries, from Hortorum viridariorumque elegantes et multiplicis artis normam affabre delineatae (Cologne, 1615). Dædalus was founded in 1955 and established as a quarterly in 1958. The journal’s namesake was renowned in ancient Greece as an inventor, scientist, and unriddler of riddles. Its emblem, a maze seen from above, symbolizes the aspiration of its founders to “lift each of us above his cell in the labyrinth of learning in order that he may see the entire structure as if from above, where each separate part loses its comfortable separateness.” The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, like its journal, brings together distinguished individuals from every ½eld of human endeavor. It was chartered in 1780 as a forum “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Now in its third century, the Academy, with its more than four thousand elected members, continues to provide intellectual leadership to meet the critical challenges facing our world. Dædalus Spring 2003 Dædalus publishes by invitation only, and as- Issued as Volume 132, Number 2 sumes no responsibility for unsolicited manu- scripts. 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Newsstand distribution by Ingram Periodicals Inc., 1240 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne tn 37086; Telephone: 800 627 6247. D. Graham Burnett Mapping time: chronometry on top of the world At dawn on the 9th of June, 1873, the had more than comfort on his mind: the sturdy Victorian ocean naturalist C. Wy- belly of Bermuda, he believed, secreted a ville Thomson swung his elegantly rare device–a kind of earth clock, an bearded person down from the deck of hourglass for planetary time. the British research vessel Challenger, For it happened that more than ½fty berthed in the Bermuda dockyards, and years earlier, the commanding of½cer of made his way aboard a diminutive steam the North American and West Indian pinnace for a day trip on the island. After station, Sir David Milne, had spent sev- churning around to Mount Langton to eral days in Walsingham indulging his pick up the governor, the shore party of petrological curiosity by carefully sever- collectors and dignitaries (with a ‘native ing an eleven-foot stalagmite from its ½sherman’ in tow as guide and a photog- moorings on the cave floor, and arrang- rapher along in the service of posterity) ing for it to be returned to the British made for Harrington Sound, rowed Isles–yet another strange fruit plucked ashore, and hiked up to the Walsingham from the colonial periphery to be en- Caves for an afternoon of learned spe- joyed in metropolitan institutions of lunking in the deep and winding lime- philosophical cultivation. This calcare- stone caverns. The cool reaches of this ous obelisk had thus found its way to a geological attraction would provide wel- new, cool, dark cave across the Atlantic come respite from the midday tropical –the Museum of the University of Edin- sun, to be sure, but Wyville Thomson burgh, where Thomson (the Regius Pro- fessor of Natural History) would later ponder its bulk and consider the manner D. Graham Burnett is an assistant professor of and pace of its formation. Between 1819 history in the Program in History of Science at and 1873 such ponderings had grown ur- Princeton University. He writes on geography and gent, since the age of the earth had burst natural history, with an emphasis on the connec- into one of the most contested questions tions between science and imperialism. He is the in science. Genesis, evolution, Darwin, author of “Masters of All They Surveyed” even thermodynamics lay in the balance.