About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang
University of Rochester Professor of Astrophysics Adam Frank's About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang (Free Press, 2011) is a survey of the history of cosmology intertwined with the history of human society, religion, and culture. The principal point of About Time is that human society, religion, and culture change over time based on what we perceive as cosmological truths. By exploring both cosmological and human history side by side, Frank gives the reader a fascinating and provocative way to view cosmology and time.
The book expands on Frank's April 2008 article in Discover Magazine called "3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang: Time may not have a beginning--and it might not exist at all." Both postulate that science is ready to abandon the idea that nothing existed before the Big Bang, that time might be an illusion, that time might not run sequentially forward and backward. How can we talk about the dawn of time--that is, the moments before and during the Big Bang--when time has no beginning?
Rather than think of the universe and its inflation, theorists are now thinking in terms of multiverses and eternal inflation. This notion was proposed in the late 1980s by MIT V.F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics Alan Guth, who wrote that when the universe was between 10^-37 and 10^-24 of a second old, it doubled repeatedly in size until the expansion, or inflation, finally slowed down.
Along with Guth, other physicists in the 1980s proposed that pocket universes might constantly be popping in and out of our universe's uninflated background. They called the sum of these pocket universes the multiverse.
Eternal inflation refers to the inflation and deflation throughout the multiverse. Fluctuations in dark energy might provide the kick that creates pockets universes out of empty space. While some pocket universes might move forward in time, others might move backwards. Basically, so the theory goes, before our Big Bang, a lot of other Big Bangs might have happened, with the inflating universes possibly collapsing into black holes or running backwards in time.
In 1999, physicist Julian Barbour wrote in The End of Time that time might not even exist. Hence, what came before our Big Bang might be fairly irrelevant.
What's unique about Frank's book is his approach. As he writes, "Even today, human culture needs its dominant cosmology, and if culture changes, it appears that cosmos building will, too."
Frank is very skilled at presenting complex science to the general public. Anyone interested in string theory, multiverses, the Big Bang, and time will understand the concepts presented in About Time.
A recipient of an American Astronomical Society prize for his science writing, Frank is a frequent contributor to many magazines, including Discover and Scientific American. He is a frequent guest on the History Channel and is the co-founder of NPR's science blog.
You can buy the book here.
For more information, please see:
Adam Frank, "3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang: Time may not have a beginning--and it might not exist at all," Discover Magazine, April 2008.
Brad Lemley, "Guth's Grand Guess," Discover Magazine, April 2002.
