About Time by Adam Frank

Time is "slippery stuff" says Frank, a theoretical astrophysicist. In this ambitious and wonderfully expansive study, he weaves together the parallel histories of personal, lived time with cosmic time – the cosmologies that we have been fashioning to explain the universe since the dawn of human civilisation. Beginning some 40,000 years ago, he evocatively describes how not just our evolving theories about the sky and stars have transformed our understanding of time, but how our everyday experience of time – "its felt contours" – changes through history. The "lived day" of a Babylonian merchant was very different from that of an 18th-century worker in the Crowley Ironworks, or "the mobile-phoned, Facebooked, e-calendared days we move through today". Cosmology now stands on a precipice: "there is change in the air". New ideas, such as the extra dimensions of string theory, may soon revolutionise our experience of time and bring about yet another twist in the "enigmatic entanglement" of cultural and cosmic time.