ABOUT TIME

Astrophysicist Adam Frank tells the story of time how our experience of it and the science behind it have changed over the centuries, and how it's all about to change again.

Time is both the grandest conception of the universe we human beings have been able to imagine and explore and the most intimate the very frame of human life. A Paleolithic farmer moved through his day in a radically different way than did a merchant living in the great city of Babylon. Denizens of the Renaissance managed their lives quite differently when clocks were first introduced to town squares and time became a precise, shared experience. With the industrial revolution, an entirely new level of precision and standardization began to dominate culture, and a new politics followed in its footsteps. As the last century began, the electrified world gave birth to yet another form of time that is the beginning of our own wireless world. Then with the dawn of the space age and the digital revolution, we made our most recent jump, toward becoming slaves to the Outlook Calendar, living breathlessly in fifteen-minute increments. Weaving cosmology into our day-to-day experience with his lively wit and down-to-earth style, Adam Frank combines the cosmological with the personal, explaining how our lives change along with our ideas of time and how we now find ourselves at the beginning of a new phase.

Adam Frank is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester and a regular contributor to Discover andAstronomy magazines. He has also written for Scientific American and many other publications and is the co-founder of NPR's "13:7 Cosmos & Culture" blog. He was a Hubble Fellow and is the recipient of an American Astronomical Society Prize for his scientific writing.