About Time is a substantial book, 432 dense pages in hardcover, and about 13 hours in the well-narrated audiobook (which I listened to). It requires a bit of concentration to get through, since it covers a lot of ground and weaves together several threads of thought. The author, Adam Frank, provides just the right amount of repetition to keep us mindful of the threads of time in both cosmology and the daily lives of people in the cultures that he follows through 50,000 years of human history. Frank's skill, along with the many fascinating historical facts he describes, make the book an informative and enjoyable journey that I would recommend for anyone interested in how we perceive time.
Though the focus is on cosmology (the study of the universe as whole), the book is almost a complete history of science, at a very high level. There is no math, and the explanations are very clear, at least for the well-understood stuff like Ptolemy's astronomy and Newton's mechanics. Things get a little murkier towards the end of the book, when Frank tries to explain the myriad astronomical and cosmological theories of today. There is so much ground to cover there that the intertwined threads of cosmology and culture get lost for a few chapters, and that part of the book was not as enjoyable as the earlier parts. This is not entirely Frank's fault, since the many mutually incompatible or vague theories of today are simply murkier for everyone. While these later chapters loose some of the enjoyable interplay of ideas, the densely presented scientific facts are a great overview of the frontiers of today's physics.
About Time really shines when Frank describes how the human experience of lived time has evolved over the millennia and centuries. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors and neolithic farmers lived by the seasons. As agriculture enabled humans to settle in permanent cities, the day began to be divided more and more precisely. The invention of mechanical clocks and their placement in city squares enabled a shared time to be experienced, and also brought about new cosmological theories of clockwork universes. The descriptions of time's role in the industrial revolution and how radio and the washing machine shaped the human experience of time in the twentieth century opened my eyes to a lot of new facts and ideas about our civilization. Throughout the book, Frank does a great job describing the intertwined forces of material engagement through technology, cultural conceptions of time, and cosmological theories.
Reading About Time gave me a new appreciation for how culture and human ideas shape our experience of time. It should be enjoyable for any fan of physics, technology, and history.
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