About Time

Title: About Time

Author: Adam Frank

Publisher: OneWorld, 2012 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-85168-909-5

Pages: 337

First of all I need to say that this book is a bit tough. Books in the popular science genre should not be so difficult to grasp, otherwise people may find it easier to go after Nature or Science, the reputed scientific journals. Frank talks about time and its meaning to the society and to cosmology, the study of the universe. The weight of learned opinion now tilts to the notion that time itself began with the big bang in which the universe originated. This preempts any attempt to ask questions like what went before the bang. What the author asserts is that cosmic time and society’s concept of time are glued together and modified according to improving standards of material engagement. For example, an individual who lived in pre-historic times may find it meaningless and confusing to learn that an event is scheduled to begin at 10.23 am. The methods of time reckoning familiar to his society was based on the movement of the sun and a resolution of a few hours was enough to run the society in good order, but not now. Modern society engages vastly superior elements in time reckoning that a resolution of even seconds may appear to be too long, in some circumstances. The book gives a history of the progress in the idea of time over the ages and also a good description of the theories governing the origin and development of the universe.

All human societies, irrespective of the state of cultural progress they were in, had means of time reckoning that was amply suitable for their purposes. Though it may seem crude to us today, the contemporaries of such primitive methods didn’t feel constrained by any inadequacy of the device. Hunter-gatherers had a measure of time that encompassed the day and the seasons. When neolithic farming and agrarian societies entered the picture, accurate reading of the season in which farming activities like seeding and manuring were performed became very important. Curious it may seem, but these people had an idea of how the universe began and allusions to such immense events are still represented by the myths that had been passed on to modern times. By the time of classical Greece, rationalism made its first halting step into learned discourse. Hellenistic thinkers repudiated the need to invoke divinity into everyday life. Development of calendars to reckon time had its beginning in Mesopotamia where accurate measurements of celestial trajectories of planets was woven into the practice of religion itself. The first systematic attempt to bring out a unified calendar took place in 46 BCE when Julius Caesar modified the existing mechanism to make Julian calendar which forms the basis of the calendar we still use.

Society’s needs for accurate time keeping depends on its material engagement. Frank lucidly explains the development of clocks around 1300s that divided the day into equal parts. The original inventor of mechanical clocks is unknown, but its spread like wildfire ever since its first appearance in 1307 at Orvieto, Italy. Clock work was perfected in a few centuries. Harrison’s naval chronometer set standards in fixing the longitude coordinates at sea. As clocks proliferated, the need to set standards of time between cities became a burning issue. It was pure chaos before 1883 when the railway mediated effort succeeded in proclaiming time zones whereby cities falling within a 15 degree stretch of longitude had a common time. Imagine the trouble when each city had a unique time while the railway had another!

The 20^th century saw the marriage of space and time into a single entity and physics finally began to move away from common sense. Einstein’s theory of general relativity established conclusively that space and time does not stand out independently as Newton had thought and that they are merged in an integrated artefact, called spacetime. Likened often to a stretched rubber sheet, the surface of spacetime gets curved due to the presence of matter or energy which causes gravitation. Thus, instead of recognizing gravity as a force, Einstein showed it as only a quirk emerging out of the curvature of spacetime. Development of electronics and computers made the dependence of society more abstract through the ubiquitous silicon devices. Even though the modern communication devices free us from the fetters of space, we are more and more tied up to electronic time set by the schedulers and calendars of the devices.

The book presents a comprehensive discussion on the theories that purported to describe the universe and its origins. From steady state theory in which it was believed that the universe existed at all times, the Big Bang theory gained prominence as it could successfully explain some of the observed facts like cosmic microwave background radiation which other theories couldn’t. Coupled with the developments in particle physics, cosmology entered a new phase in the 1990s. The observation that the universe is expanding more rapidly threw an unexpected road block on big bang theory’s path. Eternal inflation came up as a way of accounting for this effect, but it threw up several problems in its wake on the quantum level. Concept of multiple universes or multiverse which postulates the simultaneous existence of several universes in which ours is only one. Though it may appear far fetched, it helps to explain away the problem of the existence of about 20 constants in the standard model of particle physics which seem to be finetuned for the existence of life. If multiple universes exist, we can always claim that we happen to be in one which is optimized for us! However, these are only hypotheses and have no basis on observation. It is doubtful that such concepts could ever be verified by experiment or observation. We must note here that one of the basic requirements of a scientific theory is that it should be falsifiable by tests.

Frank is a professor of astrophysics and his arguments on history and culture are borrowed from other authors. Readers are forced to note the very small number of authors he has relied on. Such references are thematic and excessive reliance on other sources make the reading a bit tedious and purposeless. Readability of the book waxes and wanes over the chapters. I’m sure the somewhat dull stuff with which he begins the book must have caused a sizeable loss of readers. However, the diction improves by simplifying as one moves on and even becomes enjoyable at some points in the middle.

The discussion on cosmological models is very comprehensive, but not original – not in the sense that it is plagiarized. The theories could be gleaned from any popular science book which is far more readable than this one. Throughout the book, the author maintain that cosmic time and cultural time are somehow braided together, but not amount of nitpicking has been effective enough to establish it conclusively. Arguments are numerous, but not convincing enough!

The book is recommended only for serious readers.

Rating: 2 Star