The time of our lives

Physics World, Mar 29, 2012 

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2012/mar/29/the-time-of-our-lives

About Time: From Sun Dials to Quantum Clocks, How the Cosmos Shapes Our Lives
Adam Frank
2012 Oneworld Publications, £12.99pb 432pp

In good time

There is something about time that seems to perplex us. Time is everywhere, and nowhere; it is easy to measure, but hard to define; the past seems different from the future, but our equations do not tell us why. No wonder books about the nature of time have appeared almost as regularly as, well, clockwork, from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1988) to Paul Davies' About Time (1995), Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here (2010) and Roger Penrose's Cycles of Time (2010). In fact, I am guilty of adding to the heap myself, with In Search of Time (2008).

The latest contribution is another book called About Time, this one written by Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. With all the good titles having been taken, Frank can perhaps be forgiven for re-using Davies' from 17 years ago. More importantly, he has found a largely untapped branch of the temporal landscape to explore. Time, it seems, is the dimension that keeps on giving.

In this ambitious and sprawling work, Frank attempts to weave together the cosmological and the cultural – to show that our theories about space and time, and how we live in time, are deeply intertwined. One example of what Frank calls the "braiding" of cosmology and culture concerns the mechanical clock, which in his view is "without a doubt, the most important invention of the last thousand years". Clocks became widespread in Europe in the 14th century, bringing a more structured workday and, arguably, a more rushed way of life. But the ubiquitous clock also changed the way we imagine the cosmos itself, as the metaphor of the "clockwork universe" began to take hold. The medieval philosopher Nicole Oresme, Frank tells us, described the world as "a regular clockwork that was neither fast nor slow, never stopped, and worked in summer and winter". As for the planets circling above, Oresme found them "similar to when a person has made ahorologe [a clock] and sets it in motion, and then it moves by itself". To drive the point home, Frank adds that "People had refashioned their daily, intimate worlds to the beat of the clock, so it was only natural that their conception of the surrounding universe should follow."

At this point we are about one-quarter of the way into the book. Next comes Newton and his postulate of absolute space and time, which formed the foundation for his laws of mechanics and his law of universal gravitation. Often described as the climax of the scientific revolution, this is an oft-told tale, but Frank gives it new life by telling, in parallel, the story of Ambrose Crowley. An English industrialist and contemporary of Newton, Crowley built an ironworks near Newcastle that was, in its own way, as revolutionary as Newton's physics. This ironworks operation was the forerunner of the modern factory, and Frank argues that it succeeded because of Crowley's "genius for organizing human activity across space and time".

Frank finds these "braids" everywhere. After the scientific revolution came the industrial one, accompanied by the huffing and puffing machines that nurtured the study of thermodynamics. And it was the laws of thermodynamics that gave rise to our conception of the "heat death" of the universe, a far-off but terrifying (and seemingly inescapable) catastrophe. Then, a few decades later, radio broadcasting gave us, for the first time, a "national now", just as Einstein's theory of relativity was showing just how fragile the notion of "now" really is.

Frank includes quite a lot of material here, from the birth of agriculture and the social effect of washing machines to the pros and cons of multiple universes. Considering the scope of the text, it is a remarkably tight narrative. And he is very much up to speed on the latest speculations on what may have preceded the Big Bang, from the "colliding branes" imagined by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok in an offshoot of string theory to the "eternal inflation" model championed by Sean Carroll and others. But there are a few bumps along the way. He loves the phrase "material engagement" a little too much; in one spot it appears four times in about a page. In discussing 21st-century time pressures, a surprisingly large chunk of text is devoted to the effects of Microsoft Outlook; I found myself wondering whether life would really be any less rushed under iCalendar or Windows Live Mail. The Gregorian reform of the calendar, meanwhile, gets barely a mention, while some digressions, such as a discussion of the "Sokal hoax" of 1996, come out of the blue.

Then there is the feel-good ending. Aficionados of popular-physics writing will remember Steven Weinberg's claim in The First Three Minutes (1977) that "[The] more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." Frank, however, is untroubled by such Weinbergian pessimism. Because of the braiding of the cultural and the cosmological, he argues, we are "participants" in the universe; we are its "co-creators"; the universe contains "a vital place for us". For Frank, there is meaning to be found in this vast, dark cosmos, and "If we can recognize the enigmatic entanglement between cultural time and cosmic time, we might stop looking for God in the form of 'final theories' and find our rightful – and rightfully central – place in the narratives of creation." Our universe, Frank argues, is "suffused with meaning and potential".

Some readers will no doubt warm to this message. A sceptic, however, might counter that such a reader is like a carpenter who builds their house with a window, peers out at the world outside – and then takes comfort in the fact that they happen to have built the window that frames their view of the universe. Sure, being human requires that we experience the universe in a particular way, but does that really make us cosmic "participants"? I will also say that, in a book of this length, the second-to-last page is a bit late in the game to suddenly declare that Buddhism may hold the answer. (The author observes that "Buddhist philosophy emphasizes a doctrine called dependent arising [in which] everything in the universe…depends on everything else. Nothing ever exists entirely alone.")

For those who have been sampling the recent "time" books, there is much that will be familiar here. Even so, the book contains enough that is original to keep even seasoned "time buffs" engaged, and its author is a first-rate storyteller. Reading About Time would be time well spent.

About the author

Dan Falk is a science journalist currently pursuing a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology