Audiobook13 hours
About Time: Cosmology, Time and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang
Written by Adam Frank
Narrated by David Drummond
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
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 About Time, 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.
In About Time, 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.
Author
Adam Frank
Adam Frank is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester and a regular contributor to Discover and Astronomy 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.
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Reviews for About Time
Rating: 3.5652173652173915 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
23 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fascinating book, even if at times too detailed for me to hold in my head! It's both a history of the scientific concepts of time, how it began or if it began or has always been, and one of the cultural concepts of time, which haven't always been the same. It's mostly pretty accessible, despite the tons of detail.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed this book and was keen to pick it back up when I got the opportunity. I'm swithering between 3 and 4 stars as whilst it certainly got me thinking on several occasions there were also bits that seemed a little confusing or almost missing. However it was well enough written and as I say thought provoking and certainly worth a read.I was a little confused as to the British references though and wondered if it'd been edited for our market a little even though that wasn't indicated in the book. The author doesn't seem to have spent time in the UK but the examples seem too idiosyncratic to be what one would expect an American to pick up.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was an interesting book that covers a lot of the basics of cosmology. It uses an approach I liked, but that I'm not sure others will appreciate as much. Each chapter is introduced with a (mostly fictional, but not entirely) vignette describing some characters point of view and how it is influenced by the then predominant view of time. Most of what I read (heard, really, as I listened to this in audiobook form) was familiar material. One additional comment I will make is that this book could very easily fit into a big history style approach to viewing our cosmos. For the most part I suspect it would be approachable by any sufficiently interested high school students, so I hope it has been considered for such an endeavor.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is an inspiring tour through the history of how humans have envisioned and defined time through the ages. Also, how the concept of time is connected to how we view the beginnings of our universe and how the latest theories in cosmology will send us all in new directions. You will not look at a clock in the same way.