Physical
Available| Language | English |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 978-1-85168-909-5 |
| No of pages | 406 |
| Font Size | Medium |
| Book Publisher | Oneworld |
| Published Date | 15 Mar 2012 |
Adam Frank fell in love with astronomy when he was 5 years old and the affair has never cooled.
Late one night in the family library, Adam found the keys to the universe sketched out on the covers of his dad's pulp-science-fiction magazines—astronauts bounding across the jagged frontiers of alien worlds, starships rising to discovery on pillars of fire. The boundless world of possibilities on those covers became the one he was determined to inhabit.
Later, the love for astronomy transformed into a passion for the practice of science itself when his father's simple explanation of electric currents and sound waves turned the terror of a booming thunderstorm into an opportunity to marvel at the world's beauty. Now a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, he studies the processes that shape the formation and death of stars and has become a leading expert on the final stages of evolution for stars like the sun. Adam is a theoretical/computational astrophysicist and he heads a research group that is developing new tools for simulating the cosmos.
Adam also describes himself as an "evangelist of science." His commitment to showing others the beauty and power of science has led him to a second career as a popular writer and speaker on the subject.
He is the co-founder of National Public Radio’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog as well as a regular on-air commentator for All Things Considered. He also contributes occasionally to The New York Times. Adam is the author of three books. The most recent, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth, explores a new vision for climate change and the human future by placing them both in their proper “astrobiological” context. Climate change may likely be an expected consequence of any civilization on any planet developing an advanced industrial civilization. Adam’s first book, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Religion and Science Debate, focuses on perspectives on science and human spirituality that went beyond the usual creationism vs. Richard Dawkins debate. About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang explores the links between changing conceptions of cosmology and the human experience of time. He is also the author of a textbook Astronomy: At Play in the Cosmos. You can also sign up for his free Coursera course "Confronting The Big Questions: Highlights of Modern Astronomy".
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From Stonehenge to beyond the Big Bang, an exhilarating scientific exploration of how we make time Time is the grandest conception of the universe that we humans have been able to imagine - and its most intimate, the very frame of human life. In About Time, astrophysicist and award-winning writer Adam Frank tells the scientific story of this wonderful and tyrannical invention.
A Palaeolithic farmer moved through the sun-fuelled day and star-steered night in a radically different way than the Elizabethan merchants who set their pace to the clocks newly installed in their town squares. Since then, science has swept time into increasingly minute and standardized units - the industrial efficiency of ironworks' punch clocks; the space-age precision of atomic fountains and GPS satellites; the fifteen-minute increments of Outlook's digital revolution.
And in the past decade, string-theory branes, multiverses, and "clockless" physics have begun to overturn our ideas about how the universe began - the Big Bang - in ways that will completely rewrite time and our experience of it. Weaving cosmology with day-to-day chronicles and a down-to-earth style, About Time is both dazzling and riveting as it confronts what comes next.
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