The basic thesis is that between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of time — 0.1s — acquired a weirdly powerful role at the heart of science, and indirectly, in the shaping of all modernity.

The tldr of the book might even be: the failure to come to terms with the 0.1s limit in human cognition gave birth to modernity, with all its inherent tensions, via a set of parallel crises.

Source: One Tenth of a Second – by Venkatesh Rao