Book Review: About Time by Adam Frank
In this acclaimed book, first published in 2011, Adam Frank traces the changing perception of time and shows how man’s experience of time in social and cultural life shapes his understanding of the cosmos. Much of the discussion focuses on the nature of the Big Bang and the supposed beginning of time, with astrophysicists arguing over numerous hidden dimensions and huge amounts of invisible “black matter” needed to satisfy their complex mathematical speculations. The Big Bang, which has been part of popular scientific understanding for so long, is now being called into question. And perhaps most surprising of all for the lay reader is to discover that physicists still doubt the nature of time, to the point that some even doubt its existence.
Since their discovery, Newton’s laws, which treat time as a fourth dimension, have been applied so successfully that they guided the Apollo missions to the Moon. Einstein had already shown that time varies with the speed of the observer, slowing down to zero at the speed of light, but the effect was negligible at the relatively modest speed of a Saturn rocket. The same cannot be said for astronomical bodies, galaxies and stars, which move much faster and at speeds at which the effect on time cannot be ignored. There is no doubt that the universe is expanding, and at an ever-increasing rate, the still unanswered question is how did it all begin? Is time tied to the physical dimensions of the universe, starting at the same instant at the Big Bang, or does it have an independent existence? Was there a before our current universe and will there be an after?
Some physicists reasoned that the Big Bang was just one of a series of repeating universes. Teachers used to tell their students that only one physical law was true: the second law of thermodynamics. This law, expressed simply as entropy tends to increase, implies that order will degenerate into disorder and temperature differences will disappear leaving everything at a uniform low temperature. When applied to the possibility of repeated cycles of expanding universes, the second law has the effect of increasing the duration of each successive cycle. Going back, the cycle length shrinks to zero, so as Frank puts it, “entropy forces a beginning even for a cyclic universe.”
Despite much thought, manipulation of equations, and the introduction of hidden dimensions, physicists have not been able to find a complete explanation for the beginning of the universe. Some theories suggest the coexistence of multiple universes, each with different physical laws, and our universe has the right conditions to support life. That our universe exists is true, and that is the conclusion of Frank’s argument: ‘Always and again we have been the co-creators of a time and a cosmos that exist together with us’. For Frank, it is the process of discovery that matters, not its imagined end, and it is likely to continue for a long time.
