So, I’ve got a new book, A Brief History of Timekeeping, coming out in January— you can pre-order it now, which is an awesome thing to do— which means I’ll need to do a bunch of promotional stuff over the next several months. One of these tasks is putting together a public-lecture talk about the material that I can add to my rotation for public speaking (once we’re back to doing in-person public lectures again, anyway…). This is going to require some thought, which I keep not actually doing because I get distracted by doomscrolling and writing stuff for this Substack…
Being well aware of my procrastinatory tendencies, I’ve agreed to give a departmental colloquium on the book in early November, as a way of forcing myself to actually put something together before publication. And as further leverage, I’m going to think out loud about what that talk should be here, hopefully maximizing the bird-to-stone ratio.
With the last book, Breakfast with Einstein, one thing I did that I think worked pretty well was to modularize the talk. The book is broken into chapters that each connect one mundane morning activity to a phenomenon from quantum physics— the red glow of a toaster’s heating element to blackbody radiation, say, or the smell of coffee and tea to Pauli exclusion via organic chemistry— so I put together mini-talks for several of these, each taking something like 12-15 minutes, and could mix-and-match them a bit to make different variations on the basic theme. Some of them skewed more science-y than others, so when speaking to a group that mostly involved STEM students, I could choose topics that bumped the level up a bit, while when I knew the audience would be less STEM-heavy, I could keep it more vague.
That kind of came out of something I had done when promoting Eureka, which was to make short videos (around five minutes) based on chapters of the book. Here’s one of those for context:
I didn’t do this for Breakfast, because they were a ton of work, and it’s not clear they did all that much good. I liked the idea, though, which helped inspire the modular public talk thing. I’m on sabbatical this year, so may look at doing it again for this one, if I can overcome my general laziness.
Anyway, that’s a bit of a long lead-in to saying that I’m trying to find something along similar lines for Brief History, which again is a series of chapters on fairly discrete topics: solstice markers like Newgrange and Stonehenge; calendar systems like the Islamic, Hebrew, and Gregorian; water clocks and sandglasses; pendulum clocks and watches; and so on. The tricky part of the modularization is thinking about how to put these pieces together into stories that are different but still coherent across the talk.
Here are some ideas involving pieces that overlap in part:
Shifting Standards Version:
— Start with time as defined by apparent motion of the Sun, and talk about the astronomy that makes solstice markers work.
— Move to pendulum clocks and watches, which mark time using the harmonic oscillation of physical objects, which can be more reliable than even the orbit of the Earth.
— End with atomic clocks, which mark time based on the oscillations of light absorbed and emitted by specific elements, removing the need to accurately fabricate moving parts. These can reach incredible accuracy, enabling GPS navigation
“A Sense of Where You Are” Version:
— Astronomy of the Earth’s rotation and orbit, and using that to find latitude a la Eratosthenes.
— Longitude as a Hard Problem, solved by measuring the orbit of the Moon and developing marine chronometers.
— Atomic clocks and GPS as the ultimate solution to the problem of navigating on the Earth.
Time As a Social Convention Version:
—Astronomy of the Earth’s rotation and orbit, connecting the Sun’s motion to latitude and longitude
— Railroads and telegraphs and the establishment of standard time zones, including Daylight Saving
—Remote clock synchronization and relativity, which make time an individual phenomenon that depends on where you are and how you’re moving
Time As a Cultural Convention Version:
—Astronomy of the Earth’s rotation and orbit, connecting to calendars and keeping in synch with the seasons
—The Mayan calendar system as a reflection of radically different societal priorities (and possibly the different astronomical phenomena that occur in the tropics)
—??? This is where things break down a bit, as I’m not quite sure what would go here. I could do a pure history version and talk about Egyptian/ Hebrew/ Islamic calendars in the first bit, then end with the Gregorian, but I’d prefer to get something modern in. Maybe relativity again, but it’s a little strained to get there from the Maya. I’d really like to have a version where I bring in at least one non-European culture, though.
All Politics Version:
—Astronomy and keeping calendars in synch with the seasons, culminating in the development of the Gregorian calendar
—Railroads and telegraphs and time zones
—Atomic clocks and UTC and “leap seconds”
That’s five-ish slightly different talks using seven modules:
— Astronomy and apparent motion of the Sun
— Harmonic motion and its use in clocks and watches
— Longitude and timekeeping
— Railroads and time zones
— Clock synchronization and relativity
— Atomic clocks and GPS
— The Mayan calendar
Some of those would need to come in different flavors emphasizing different points— astronomy focused only on solstice markers vs. astronomy connecting to navigation vs. astronomy connecting to the Gregorian system— but those would involve small tweaks to largely the same set of slides. They (almost) all accomplish the goal of getting from ancient times to modern physics, which is one of the main themes of the book. And they would appeal to/ connect with different audiences— the first one on the list is very physics-centric, the last one is mostly politics.
So, I think that’s a place for me to start putting these things together. Now I just need to find a way to trick myself into actually making slides…
This was a useful exercise for me, and also probably a preview of a lot of book-related content to come. If that’s appealing, here are some buttons you might choose to click:
If you have thoughts on other ways to organize these kinds of things that you’d like to share, the comments will be open.