Frank - About time: from sundials to quantum clocks, how the cosmos shapes our lives-- and how we shape the cosmos

PRAISE FOR ABOUT TIME

A fascinating and comprehensive survey of how technology from farming to railways to telegraphy to the internet has changed our everyday concept of time. [Frank] is excellent at showing how our ideas of human and cosmic time have evolved hand in hand ... Compelling.

Marcus Chown, New Scientist

Eloquent ... [Franks] trek through the history of humanity takes a parallel look at how we have gained a deeper grasp of the Universe during our time on Earth.

Nature

A phenomenal blend of science and cultural history ... Ultimately, Frank argues that recognizing our place in the ongoing narrative of the creation of cultural time and cosmic time moving beyond the cosmology of the Big Bang (of which ours may be one of many) is what will allow mankind to enter a new, global era of time and culture.

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

This will fascinate anyone curious about the nexus of astronomy and history and, of course, time.

Library Journal

Frank ponders fresh ideas in cosmology ... and how the human perception of time will change in the future.

Washington Post

This one is a must-read! The book does a wonderful job weaving together the story of human history and time in the context of the universe. From the Big Bang to the Renaissance to cell phones to the multiverse, [Frank] takes extremely complex ideas and makes them easily digestible, endlessly fascinating, and fun. About Time will make you think.

Culture of Science

Time is the most used noun in the English language, yet we still dont really understand it. Adam Frank tells the fascinating story of how humans have struggled to make sense of time, especially in the context of the universe around us. From prehistory to the Enlightenment, through Einstein and on to the multiverse, this is a rich and inspiring tour through some of the biggest ideas that have ever been thought.

Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here

ALSO BY ADAM FRANK

The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate

A Oneworld Book

First published in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth by
Oneworld Publications 2012
This ebook edition published in 2012

Originally published in the United States of America by Free Press,
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., in 2011

Copyright 2011 by Adam Frank

The moral right of Adam Frank to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available
from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-85168-909-5
Ebook ISBN 978-1-78074-060-7

Cover design by Richard Green
Text designed by Paul Dippolito

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For Alana, for all time

Prologue

BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, USA APRIL 16, 2007, 3:20 P.M.

The girl in the third row raises her hand and I know Im in trouble.

The lecture hall is packed with students. In front, the perennially scribbling pre-meds have put down put their pens. Usually desperate for any fact that might appear on the exam, this terms crop of grade hunters have stopped blindly transcribing everything I say and are, for the first time all year, simply listening. In the way back, the line of identical frat boys with their matching baseball caps are actually paying attention to the lecture rather than hiding behind their newspapers or whispering to the cute sorority girls clustered around them.

This is the class I cherish. From years of teaching I know this is the subject everyone cares about. I am deep into the cosmology lecture of my Astronomy 101 class. Today its all Big Bang and cosmic origins, and the students are wide-eyed. For this one hour, the windows of the universe will open up for them. For this one hour, they will climb out of their day-to-day concerns about grades and careers and getting laid and briefly stand in wonder at the deepest questions their species has learned to ask... and answer.

I dont expect these students to pay such rapt attention to my other lectures: the ones on stellar evolution, the history of astronomy or comparative planetology. But with the Big Bang I know their attention will be fixed for long enough to briefly catch a glimpse of our communal place in the fabric of creation. And, within this hour, I also know that sooner or later someone is going to break the spell and ask that one damn question.

Professor? she calls out. Sophie is her name. She is one of the students on fire with the subject this yearearnest, intelligent, alive to the big mysteries an astronomy class naturally washes up against. OK, I think, here it comes. I tell her to go ahead.

But Professor, she begins, what happened before the Big Bang?

The usual vertigo closes in. Yeah, I think, thats a good question. What the hell did happen before the Big Bang? There is a long pause as the class waits expectantly. As if I, or anyone else, really have the answer.

4:08 p.m. I have lost them. Looking across the hall, I can see the mystery has dissipated. The real world has returned. The class is supposed to end at 4:15. Still in the thick of the lecture, I have already strayed too close to that imaginary deadline that marks the end of class. My story of cosmic creation has lost its urgency and become a death march of facts and details. The beginning of time and the nature of time both have become abstractions. Time and the cosmos shrink, congealing into the urgencies of now: the next class, the homework review session, the hoped-for hour at the gym, the coffee appointment with friends.

It is still too early for them to gather up their books and begin the shifting and rustling that mark the end of class. Instead, the students sit and feel the minutes collapse slowlyso slowlyinto an ooze of boredom. They are caught in a purgatory of waiting, an empty place mediated only by their devices and technology. Some watch the minutes tick off on their open laptops. Others fill the wait by sending instant messages to friends across the quad or across the continent. Others see the abstraction of time become concrete on their mobile phones, each little box connected to a global cadence of milliseconds passing through waves of electromagnetic energy and information. While I continue to lecture about time and the universe, the students feel their own experience of both weighing down on them. If only they knew how closely connected their personal worlds were to the sweep of cosmic history I am recounting. And if only they understood how much it was all about to change.

ITS ABOUT TIME

This book tells two stories that are braided so tightly they cannot be separated, even if they have never been told together before. Like my cosmology lecture that April day in 2007, the twin narratives I am about to unfold encompass the grandest conception of the universe we human beings have been able to imagine and explore. At the same time they embrace our most intimate and most personal experience of the worldthe very frame of human life.

This book is about time, both cosmic and human.

The subject of time can transport us to the deepest levels of reflection. By looking out into the depths of space, we are always looking back in time and so, on its largest scale, our science of the universe is also, always, a story about the depths of time. There are many booksphilosophical, technical and popularon the nature of time as we experience it. There are just as many books telling the story of cosmic time by recounting the grand story of scientific cosmology. But there are few instances where we stop to ask how our stories about the universes time are intimately wedded to the texture of time in our daily lives. Now there is a compelling reason to recount the braided narratives of cosmic history and human time as a unified whole: