About Time
Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang
by Adam Frank
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About Time
Cosmic and human conceptions of time have always been linked, even as they evolved separately. Across centuries, scientists steadily increased the age of the universe before settling on the Big Bang model, in which space and time were birthed in an event 13.7 billion years ago. Meanwhile, human timekeeping evolved from reckoning with sundials to glancing at cell phone displays. In About Time, Adam Frank studies both conceptions of time, chronicles their evolving relationship, and explains why this bond is on the cusp of reinvention.
“The Big Bang is all but dead,” states Frank, “and we do not yet know what will replace it.” His point: The Big Bang happened, but its status as the absolute origin of time is now being questioned by some cosmologists. A slew of new theories are daring to ask what, if anything, happened before the initial singularity; perhaps universes eternally branch from each other, or perhaps “bangs” occur cyclically. “The roots of cosmology,” he writes, “cannot be reworked without a new conception of time, its origins and its physical nature.”
If cosmology is about to re-imagine time, how will this affect the way we experience time from moment to moment? This question forms the heart of the book’s second narrative. To answer it, Frank recounts the history of “lived time,” showing how our sense of social and personal time has been transformed and rebuilt many times since humanity awoke to self-consciousness 50,000 years ago. Our cultures, he writes, are “soaked in time,” and have shaped our grandest imaginings of cosmology from myth down to the exact science we are familiar with.
About Time is a brilliantly conceived meditation on the interplay between two views of time.
Hardcover : 320 pages
Publisher: Free Press ( September 27, 2011 )
Item #: 13-419884
ISBN: 9781439169599
Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 inches
Product Weight: 21.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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