A Brief History of Timekeeping, Blog, Books

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIMEKEEPING: Submitted

Today is my contractual deadline for submitting the manuscript of A Brief History of Timekeeping. I’m not sure this counts as the formal changeover from book-in-progress to book-in-process– I think that may actually be when the edits are finished and it goes off to the production team– but it’s definitely an inflection point. Here’s the table of contents as it currently exists (numbers in parentheses are word counts from Google Docs), with a brief description to unpack my cryptic chapter titles:

  • Intro: A Clock Is a Thing That Ticks (2563) Basic set-up of the book and the recurring themes
  • Chapter 1: Sunrise (5261) Motion of the Sun through the day and through the year, ancient solstice markers like Newgrange and Stonehenge
  • Chapter 2: The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (8196) The yearly motion of the Sun against the background of stars, the phases of the Moon, and calendar systems from the Middle East and Europe
  • Chapter 3: The Maya (7077)  Everybody’s favorite Mesoamerican civilization, and [Jesse Ventura voice] the planet Venus.
  • Chapter 4: Drips and Drops (5864) The history of water clocks and sandglasses.
  • Chapter 5: Ticks and Tocks (8059) The basics of mechanical clocks and the physics of the pendulum
  • Chapter 6: Heavenly Wanderers (9355) Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and the origins of the modern solar system.
  • Chapter 7: Longitude (6929) The method of lunar distances and mechanical clocks for shipboard use.
  • Chapter 8: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? (4794) The introduction of time zones thanks to railroads and telegraphs
  • Chapter 9: The Measure of Spacetime (9042) The origins of Special Relativity in the physics of synchronizing clocks
  • Chapter 10: Quantum Clocks (9311) The basics of cesium atomic clocks and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
  • Chapter 11: Time and Gravity (4836) The origins of General Relativity and how it affects time
  • Chapter 12: The Future of Time (6187) Next-generation atomic clocks, including both trapped ions and optical lattice clocks
  • Conclusion: Time Enough for Everyone (2696) Quartz oscillators and the democratization of timekeeping.

This totals a hair over 90,000 words, which is a bit more than the contract called for. Oops. Of course, many of these will turn out to be the wrong words once my editor takes a look at it, so that’s definitely going to change…

I wish I had a cover image to put at the top of this post, but that hasn’t been decided yet (sometime in January). I do know that there are two top candidates, either of which I would be very happy with, so that’s good, and I look forward to being able to show off whichever one the sales team likes the best.

I say this about every book, but in a lot of ways this was the hardest to write so far, because it covers so many different subjects. Most of these I knew a bit about already because I’ve taught a class based on this general topic, but knowing enough to do a ten-week survey course and knowing enough to write a full book on a topic and get the details right are two very different things. I’ve got probably 100 pounds of books from Union’s library stacked in various places around the house, and a huge number of PDF papers in my references folder. There were more than a few points in this process where I found myself wishing I was more willing to run with the colorful but thinly sourced anecdotes I see in a lot of other pop-science writing, but I’m just not, which made a lot more work for me. (Thanks, also to Thony Christie and Tom Swanson for checking my work in a couple of chapters.) I’m reasonably proud of how it’s come out– when I did the full read-through these last couple of weeks, I didn’t hate it, and that’s a good sign at this stage.

And, of course, there was this whole global pandemic thing that forced me out of my happy writing place at the end of the counter in the Niskayuna Starbucks, and the sheer weight of pandemic and election news that made it super difficult to write anything at all.

At any rate, this first draft is officially complete, and the folder with all the chapter files is being shared with my editor today. Sadly, I don’t get much time to celebrate, as I’ve got a couple of day-job meetings today and a deadline for a different side hustle (no, it’s not a podcast) in two weeks. The fun just never ends in Chateau Steelypips.

The important thing is: the first draft of the book is complete: calloo, callay, and all that.