I mentioned some time back that it was feeling weird to not have an official Next Project to be working on. That, of course, led to coming up with some options for a Next Project, and starting those on their slow way through the system. Which has led to today: This morning, I officially signed the contract to write a new book.

The working title is A Brief History of Timekeeping, which long-time readers of my stuff might recognize as the title of a course I’ve offered a few times at Union, on the science and technology of keeping track of time passing. This is a really rich subject, and spans several millennia: the proposal has the subtitle “The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks.” I was a little surprised, back when I started working on the class, to find that nobody had written a book on this topic. Particularly with that semi-joking title just sitting there. Anyway, I made a mental note of this as a thing to pursue down the road, and, well, here we are…

The focus of the book will be on the technology of keeping time, not the more abstract physics of time-as-a-component-of-spacetime. This will be mostly physics, because that’s my home field, but there are also some fascinating sidelines into history and culture thanks to all the different schemes people have devised through human history for marking time.

The contract is with BenBella Books, publishers of Breakfast with Einstein. They were very good to work with on that book, and both sides are pleased with how it’s done since it came out in December. So, I’m looking forward to working with them again, and as always at the start of a new book project, I have high hopes for it.

Due date for the manuscript is December 2020, publication roughly a year later. And you can expect a lot of odd tweets and blog posts about stuff relating to time and timekeeping over the next year-and-a-bit as writing this consumes most of my attention…