It’s the big day: A Brief History of Timekeeping is released into the wild today, in the US at least. Sadly, I have an inconveniently full schedule of book-promo stuff and actual day-job work, which will prevent me from doing my traditional Quest to look for a new book on the shelves of local stores. I may hit the one in downtown Schenectady on my way to campus, but that’s it. If you happen to find yourself in a bookstore and see a copy on the shelves, I love seeing photos of my books in distant locales, so hit me on Twitter (@orzelc) or Instagram (@chad.orzel).
A couple of live events to plug, before I talk a bit more about the book and the writing thereof:
— Tonight, Tuesday the 25th, at 6pm ET (11pm GMT), I’ll be doing an interview/Q&A with Northshire Books in Saratoga. this was originally supposed to be in person, but learning the Greek alphabet one variant at a time derailed that, so it’s now an online event you can attend via Zoom. (Link is to the store’s page for registration…)
— This Thursday, the 27th, at 7pm ET, I’m doing a similar online book talk/ Q&A for Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, NH. This was always planned to be online, as I wasn’t confident it would be wise to drive to New Hampshire in late January. Again, you can get more information from the store page for the event.
— Next Thursday, 3 Feburary, at 7pm GMT (2pm ET), I’ll be doing a live talk for the Royal Institution in the UK. This is the one I most wish could be in person, but alas, we can’t have nice things these days. I don’t think they limit attendance to folks in the UK, so if that fits your schedule, here’s their event page.
I’m also doing a slew of podcasts and radio events; links will appear in the weekly round-up posts here as they become available. If you want to see me flirting with disaster by doing live presentations online, though, those are your current best bets (there will be more coming).
But the real point here is to talk about the book. So, what’s the deal with A Brief History of Timekeeping?
This is my fifth pop-science book, and offers pretty much what the title and subtitle (“The Science of Marking Time, From Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks”) say. It’s a survey of timekeeping technology over the last several thousand years, starting with solstice markers and sundials, moving up through water clocks and mechanical clocks, and ending with modern atomic clocks, both the microwave-frequency cesium clocks that currently define the second and the optical-frequency clocks now in development. You can find some of the high points in listicle form at Forbes.
There’s also a lot of history and culture in with the science: discussion of various calendar systems, and the politics of developing and implementing the Gregorian calendar and the modern system of standardized time zones. There’s even some stuff that verges on philosophy, about the connection between clock synchronization and the theory of relativity, and how that leads to the conclusion that what we see as space and perceive as the flow of time depends on where we are and how we’re moving.
I’ll note that while this has “History” in the title, it’s first and foremost a book about science, using the historical frame to introduce readers to a wide range of topics in astronomy and physics. I went to some pains to get the history as right as possible, including reading some rather lengthy books on stuff that becomes a few short paragraphs of background, but it’s not a comprehensive work of historical scholarship. There are lots of places where the discussion of the history parts will feel a little abbreviated, because it is— my priority was the science stuff.
On the science side, I pushed pretty hard to get some stuff in here that you won’t find elsewhere. I hard a hard time tracking down a good discussion of how Kepler actually determined that Mars’s orbit was an ellipse, so I made sure to get that in, hopefully making it more accessible for the next person who wants to know. And I suspect this is the only pop-science book that goes into detail about how an optical frequency comb works (unless Ted Hänsch wrote one that I don’t know about). These admittedly aren’t distinctions that my publicist can do much with, but they mean a lot to me.
That combination of rich history as a hook for bringing people deeper into science is the real origin of the book. The first time I used the Hawking-tweaking title was for a guest lecture in a course by a colleague in English, who was teaching about time in literature but asked for one lecture on time in science. Going through the rapid survey of timekeeping technologies made me realize that there was some real potential here, and I turned the core idea into a full course for our “Sophomore Research Seminar” program. These are courses required of all students at Union (typically sophomores, as you’d guess from the name, but students in the honors program take it in their first year) that are supposed to introduce students to college-level research. They’re not part of a major and can’t have prerequisites, so it’s kind of perfectly suited to developing pop-science level material, and the topic here offered something for everyone.
(The most fun aspect of the course the three times I’ve taught it ended up coming out of a bit of passive-aggression on my part. When these courses were introduced, they were pitched as introducing students to research in a way that would be useful to everyone, but the guidelines emphasized a whole bunch of stuff with minimal relevance to research in the STEM fields. I had several long arguments about this with the people who came up with the idea, then decided I would just teach a course where I required students to do science. The second and third times I taught it, I forbade library-research term papers, and required each student to do a final project where they actually made measurements of something involving time and timekeeping. Lots of them built sundials, others tested watches, and a few made elaborate water clocks of types I’d never encountered before. It was great, and drastically cut down on the amount of ersatz academese I had to grade.)
After Breakfast With Einstein, this was at the top of the list of potential next-book ideas, so I wrote it up and my publishers really liked the idea. It changed a bit in moving from a hands-on course to a pop-science book, but the basic structure— surveying several thousand years of history more or less in order— was solid, and changed very little.
I say this in the afterword of basically every book, but in a lot of ways this ways the hardest of the five to write. Partly because it covers such a wide range of topics in both science and history, but it’s actually not that much more wide-ranging than Eureka was some years back. The biggest issue here, unsurprisingly, was that I was four chapters into the first draft when the pandemic shut everything down in March 2020, and forced a drastic change in my writing routine. It also got a lot harder to check books out of the library— much respect to the librarians and Union who pulled stuff out of the stacks for me (and many other faculty) when we weren’t allowed in the building.
Anyway, I’m proud of this one— I know, I know, authors always say that— and hope you’ll check it out. If you buy a copy from one of the online retailers helpfully linked from the publisher’s page, please do leave a review, because the algorithms that rule everything these days pick up on those, and more reviews means more search traffic.
So, yeah, that’s self-promotional, but it’s release day, roll with it. Here are some buttons:
And if you have nice things to say or photos of the book in the wild, the comments will be open.