We’re coming toward the end of the publicity cycle for A Brief History of Timekeeping— there are a few more pre-recorded podcast-y things that haven’t gone public yet, and I may reach out to some folks about the possibility of doing live events a little farther in the future. But for the moment, there’s just one more significant real-time event, a virtual lecture through New Scientist’s “Big Thinkers” series happening tomorrow, Thursday the 12th, at 6pm British time (1pm Eastern US time). This is a ticketed event, but the ticket gets you online access to a recording of the presentation for a year, so if you’re not able to make that time, it might still be worth the outlay.
(As an aside, I love how the graphic they put together makes it look like I might possibly be some kind of genial bouncer for the Big Thinkers clubhouse…)
If you’ve heard one of my previous book talks on this cycle, say the one for Gibson’s bookstore or the Royal Institution, I can promise that this one is totally new. Well, OK, not totally new in the sense of having zero overlap with previous presentations, because as rich as the subject is, there’s only so many things I can sensibly talk about. But I did rip up a lot of it, and added a bunch of never-before-seen material to the slide deck, including bits about Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, the Mayan calendar system, and experimental tests of both special and general relativity. As you can see from this summary image slide:
To better connect to the “Big Thinker” series, I tried to build this around some intellectual themes that recur in the science of timekeeping: the fundamentally cyclical nature of timekeeping (we quantify time by counting repeated cycles), the tension between that cyclical element and the one-way nature of time as an experience (inexorably moving from past to future), and the desire to use science and timekeeping to not only measure the passage of time, but predict the future. I think it came together pretty well, but I’m not really the right person to judge that. If I didn’t get it right, well, there’s a live (via Zoom) Q&A portion of tomorrow’s event that people can use to try to clear it up.
As I said, the really active flogging of this book (buy it! Buy my book!) is kind of winding down at this point. It’s been a lot of fun, though I wish more of it had been live-in-person than live-on-a-screen. If you’re part of an organization that hosts talks by people who may or may not be Big Thinkers, I’m always happy to have more opportunities to do this kind of thing, so please, hit me up via any of the obvious channels. If you just want to see me wearing grown-up clothes and talking into a webcam in my office, well, tickets are still available.
And now, there will be a bit of breath-catching, then it’s on to the next thing…
This is more crassly promotional than the usual content here, I realize, but I did want to put a bit of a pin in this. I wouldn’t expect much between now and next Monday—between this event, the Board meeting this weekend, and kid sports, I’m pretty swamped, but if you’d like to be among the first to know about more original Big Thoughts, here’s a button:
And if for some reason you feel so moved, the comments will be open: