About Time

Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang

Adam Frank

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781439169605
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439169612
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Big Bang is all but dead, and we do not yet know what will replace it. Our universe’s “beginning” is at an end. What does this have to do with us here on Earth? Our lives are about to be dramatically shaken again—as altered as they were with the invention of the clock, the steam engine, the railroad, the radio and the Internet.

In The End of the Beginning, Adam Frank explains how the texture of our lives changes along with our understanding of the universe’s origin. Since we awoke to self-consciousness fifty thousand years ago, our lived experience of time—from hunting and gathering to the development of agriculture to the industrial revolution to the invention of Outlook calendars—has been transformed and rebuilt many times. But the latest theories in cosmology— time with no beginning, parallel universes, eternal inflation—are about to send us in a new direction.

Time is both our grandest and most intimate conception of the universe. Many books tell the story, recounting the progress of scientific cosmology. Frank tells the story of humanity’s deepest question— when and how did everything begin?—alongside the story of how human beings have experienced time. He looks at the way our engagement with the world— our inventions, our habits and more—has allowed us to discover the nature of the universe and how those discoveries, in turn, inform our daily experience.

This astounding book will change the way we think about time and how it affects our lives.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Prologue: Beginnings and Endings
• Chapter One: Talking Sky, Working Stone and Living Field
• Chapter Two: The City, the Cycle and the Epicycle
• Chapter Three: The Clock, the Bell Tower and the Spheres of God
• Chapter Four: Cosmic Machines, Illuminated Night and the Factory Clock
• Chapter Five: The Telegraph, the Electric Clock and the Block Universe
• Chapter Six: The Expanding Universe, Radio Hours and Washing
• Chapter Seven: The Big Bang, Telstar and a New Armageddon
• Chapter Eight: Inflation, Cell Phones and the Outlook Universe
• Chapter Nine: Wheels Within Wheels: Cyclic Universes and the Challenge
• Chapter Ten: Ever-Changing Eternities: The Promise and Perils of a Multiverse
• Chapter Eleven: Giving Up the Ghost: The End of Beginnings and the End of Time
• Chapter Twelve: In the Fields of Leaning Grass
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index
• Copyright