About Time Read online

  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 ... [Frank’s] 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 don’t 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

  Oneworld Publications

  185 Banbury Road

  Oxford OX2 7AR

  England

  Learn more about Oneworld. Join our mailing list to find out about our latest titles and special offers at:

  www.oneworld-publications.com

  For Alana, for all time

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Beginnings and Endings

  CHAPTER ONE

  Talking Sky, Working Stone and Living Field:

  From Prehistory to the Agricultural Revolution

  CHAPTER TWO

  The City, the Cycle and the Epicycle:

  From the Urban Revolution to a Rational Universe

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Clock, the Bell Tower and the Spheres of God:

  From the Medieval Monastery to the Renaissance Cosmos

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cosmic Machines, Illuminated Night and the Factory Clock:

  From Newton’s Universe to Thermodynamics and the Industrial Revolution

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Telegraph, the Electric Clock and the Block Universe:

  The Imperatives of Simultaneity from Time Zones to Einstein’s Cosmos

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Expanding Universe, Radio Hours and Washing Machine Time: Speed, Cosmology and Culture Between the World Wars

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Big Bang, Telstar and a New Armageddon:

  The Nuclear Big Bang’s Triumph in a Televised Space Age

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Inflation, Mobile Phones and the Outlook Universe:

  Information Revolutions and the Big Bang Gets in Trouble

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wheels Within Wheels: Cyclic Universes and the Challenge of Quantum Gravity: Eternal Time Through Repeating Time

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ever-Changing Eternities: The Promise and Perils of a Multiverse: Eternal Inflation, Arrows of Time and the Anthropic Principle

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Giving Up the Ghost: The End of Beginnings and the End of Time: Cosmology’s Radical Alternatives in Three Acts

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In the Fields of Leaning Grass:

  Ending the Beginning in Human and Cosmic Time

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  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 I’m 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 term’s 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 year—earnest, 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, that’s 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 cla
ss. 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 slowly—so slowly—into 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.

  IT’S 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 world—the 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 books—philosophical, technical and popular—on 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 universe’s 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: the Big Bang is all but dead, and we do not yet know what will replace it.

  There are those who will tell you that cosmology—the study of the universe entire—has become an exact science. They will tell you that this grand and all-embracing field has, in the last fifty years, moved from the realms of philosophical speculation into the purest domains of science via exacting confrontations between theoretical models and high-resolution data. You should know that they are right. For the first time in the long march of human thinking we are now, finally, able to construct a detailed and verifiable account of cosmic history.

  So when I tell you that the Big Bang is dead, I am not referring to the story that begins with a universe far hotter and far denser than what we see today. I do not mean the story of a universe expanding, of matter cooling and congealing over billions of years into stars and galaxies. That story, the scientific narrative of cosmic evolution over the last 13.7 billion years is, for all intents and purposes, secure.

  It is the beginning, the genesis, that stands ready to be replaced. The singular and all-important moment of creation at the beginning of the Big Bang—the beginning of time and existence—is poised to be swept aside. In other words, it’s the bang in the Big Bang that we, in our endless quest to understand the world, are ready to abandon. That single moment of creation with no before has been done in by the very precision of the science that gave the idea a measure of reality.

  Now it appears that science is ready to go beyond, and before, the Big Bang. Cosmology is waiting at the precipice of its next great revolution. The only question is where—or, better yet, when—do we go from here? We are ending the beginning and beginning down another path.

  Cosmology and its impending reformation form the first narrative line of this book. If we are to understand how our grandest theories of the universe are about to change, we must first understand how we got to the Big Bang in the first place. Along the way we will encounter the most potent ideas of modern physics from Einstein’s theory of relativity to the powerful but paradoxical realm of quantum mechanics and subatomic physics. In this first story we will explore cosmological foundations so that, when the moment comes, we will be ready to imagine the range and meaning of the Big Bang’s bizarre alternatives.

  And this is all about time. The roots of cosmology cannot be reworked without a new conception of time, including its origins and its physical nature. In Big Bang cosmology physicists imagined time to simply begin, like God firing up the engine on his cosmic Porsche. Alternative cosmologies, hovering just across the horizon, must replace that vision with something new.

  Time, however, is slippery stuff. In both our abstract ideas about time and our attempts to understand its direct experience we are always walking on thin ice. Our scientific theorizing about time must always, at some point, meet our concrete, day-to-day movement through it. But where is that point? If the science of cosmology is about to re-imagine time, then how will that affect the way we experience time from moment to moment?

  That question forms the heart of this book’s second narrative. If the first story leads us to the precipice of modern cosmology, the second story tells what might be called the social history of time—a history of lived time. And in that second story there awaits a radical truth: as our ideas about cosmology and cosmic time have changed, human time has changed too. The industrial revolution, with its roots in the scientific discoveries of Newton and its radical reformation of human life, is perhaps the most potent and obvious example of the binding of human and cosmic time. Throughout the 1700s, new universal laws of physics pioneered by Newton reworked human conceptions of the heavens. Then, in time, Newton’s mechanics became the blueprint for machines unlike anything human culture had built before, laying the ground for the triumph of industrialism. As workers filed into their new punch-clock lives of efficient production their world echoed the new clockwork universe of planets clicking through their orbits governed by economical rules of gravity and motion. Human time and cosmic time had been partnered in mutual transformation. But the two times—cosmological and human—had always been intertwined, and there was never an age when they could be cleanly separated.

  The brute facts of time and nature are simple—the day lasts from sunrise to sunset—but from that point onward the simplicity ends. Our sense of social and personal time has been transformed and rebuilt in the many revolutions since we awoke to self-consciousness fifty thousand years ago. From hunter-gatherer tribes to the development of agriculture to the industrial revolution, our encounters with time have been reshaped again and again. Yet unrealized, the resonance between human and cosmic time is the essential instrument in this story of transformation. Cultures need a cosmology to understand their place in the greater framework of creation. But cosmologies—mythological or scientific—are collaborative creations that spring from the collective efforts and resources of entire cultures. When cultural time and cosmic time change, they change together. In an era dominated by scientific advancements, the simple assumption would be that new technologies lead the way, creating new cosmological narratives that also reshape culture. As we will see, the truth is far richer. The imperatives of changing culture or changing cosmology are always pushing back and forth on each other. At some moments in history one side takes the lead in changing time, and at other moments it’s the other side that surges forward to initiate change. But always and again, time—both cosmic and human—has changed in ways that we have yet to fully comprehend.

  Ask a friend what time it is and he might look at his watch and respond that it is 1:17 p.m. But wh
at is 1:17 p.m.? What is the meaning of such an exact metering of minutes? There is nothing innate, objective or God-given about this kind of time. As we shall see, mechanical clocks did not appear until the fourteenth century, and they did not even have minute hands (an invention that would take approximately another three hundred years to appear). Did 1:17 p.m. even exist one thousand years ago for peasants living in Dark Ages Europe, Song Dynasty China or the central Persian Empire? Was there such a thing as 1:17 p.m. in the long millennia before the vast majority of human beings had access to any form of timekeeping device?

  But 1:17 exists for you. As a citizen of a technologically advanced culture replete with omnipresent time-metering technologies, you have felt 1:17 in more ways then you probably want to think about.

  How often have you found yourself on time for a train, a bus or an appointment that was scheduled as an exact block on your electronic calendar? Then, somehow, a delay appeared. The bus was late, the train had not yet arrived, the appointment was pushed back. Suddenly you are forced into the purgatory of waiting. Through the mediation of your watch or your mobile phone (with its automatically updating time-zone compliant chronometer), you feel those minutes crawl past just as my students felt the weight of their minutes until the lecture ended: 1:11, 1:15, 1:17. They drag on breeding frustration, boredom and anger. For you, those minutes are real.

  Measured against the long arc of human evolution, this experience of time is something new and very radical. You feel time in a way that nobody did a thousand years ago. In 2000 BCE or 850 CE there was no culturally agreed-upon 1:17 p.m. For the vast majority of human existence, there was only “after lunch” or “in the afternoon”.

  It’s a new time that we have created in our hyperdigital, telepresent, instant-messaged society. Connected simultaneously to all points of a GPS-mapped globe, we struggle to get that last batch of e-mails sent out before the 2:30 meeting, only to watch helplessly as a new batch appears. It’s a new time we have invented, and it appears to have left us with no time at all.