by Adam Frank
Adding to the debate in 1676, Danish astronomer Ole Romer discovered that light travelled with a finite speed. While many astronomers were “curiously reluctant” to recognize that looking out in space meant looking back in time, others grasped this powerful link between space and time.41 As Francis Robert wrote in 1694, “Light takes up more time in Travelling from the Stars to us than we in making a West-India voyage (which is ordinarily performed in six weeks).”42
In the wake of Newton and the material engagement of new telescope technologies, all the ancient questions of cosmology had been reopened. Acceptance of an infinite Newtonian universe had renewed discussion of other universes. Newton opined that, given God’s omnipotence, other cosmos with other laws of nature might well exist. The French mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (the co-inventor with Newton of calculus) also held that God could create other universes but chose not to since this one was the best of all possible choices. The Italian Jesuit astronomer Roger Boscovich even imagined that other “spaces” might exist causally disconnected from our universe.43 Boscovich reasoned that nothing occurring in our universe could affect the behaviour and evolution of matter in these other spaces. Likewise, all events in these other universes could not have any effect on the course of cosmic history in our space. The idea was wild speculation for Boscovich’s day but now appears as a premonition of ideas that play a pivotal role in our own historical moment.
Many modern alternatives to the Big Bang hinge on the concept of a multiverse. Thus these early discussions of its possibility within a Newtonian framework show us, once again, the resilience of the five great cosmological questions. Time and again, humanity returns to its same storehouse of cosmological possibilities even as new forms of material engagement alter culture, politics and economics.
THE BIRTH OF INDUSTRIAL TIME
As the eighteenth century came to a close, astronomers had triumphed in mapping the dynamics of the night sky. So complete was the victory of Newtonian mechanics in astronomy that even the role of God had diminished to insignificance. When Napoleon asked the renowned French astronomer Pierre Laplace why God was never mentioned in his new book on celestial mechanics, Laplace famously answered, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”44
It is, then, even more remarkable that at the very moment astronomy began to shed light on the movement of the stars, the industrial revolution would rob humanity of its most basic experience of night. As the foundations of Newton’s mechanics gave birth to a new age of machines, industrial culture would rewire human time to change the boundaries of work and rest, day and dark.
By most accounts, the industrial revolution began in earnest at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The movement from cottage industries founded on small-scale, home-based operations to large-scale, machine-intensive industrial production is, once again, a story of material engagement facilitating the creation of new cultural and political structures. Unlike previous transformations, however, the coupling of idea and practice, theory and application, would be explicit and nearly simultaneous. The distinct processes of science would now shape how humans encountered the world’s material properties. These would, in turn, shape the culture into which all future generations were born. As Newtonian mechanics became machines, both human time and cosmic time would be transformed.
The revolution began in England. New machines were the pivot points; textile production led the way as inventions such as John Kay’s flying shuttle and James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny allowed industrialists to turn cotton into thread on a massive scale.45 Based on the efficacy of these machines, the factory system was born, and new methods of production came with it. Workers now focused their effort on these machines, carrying out only a few, repetitive tasks in the chain of steps needed to manufacture a product—allowing textile production to jump by a factor of three from 1796 to 1830.46 Factories, originally located alongside rivers to tap the power of flowing water, were soon fuelled instead by James Watt’s steam engine and could be sited anywhere. The creation of Robert Fulton’s steamboat and George Stephenson’s steam-powered train brought transportation into the industrial revolution, pushing aside the age of the sail and horse-drawn cart.
Human resources also fuelled the revolution. In order to create a ready pool of workers that could be drawn to the cities, the Enclosure Act of 1801 forced English peasant farmers off the land they had tended for generations.47 While other countries would soon follow, England led the way in its invention of both machines and the cultural forms that would define the new age.
Many of the transformations in human time that arose during the industrial revolution are obvious enough that they need no reiterating. Suffice it to say that the factory system formed an entirely new time matrix for an ever-expanding fraction of Europeans. Time became compressed and abstracted for both worker and manager alike. For the first time in human history, minutes became a temporal unit of exchange—they counted and they could be counted. They became crucial as factory owners sought efficiency in production and workers resisted the push to turn their bodies into mere extensions of machines. For millennia, work had been limited by biology in terms of both human and animal exhaustion. Steam-powered machines freed work from these ancient biological constraints—at least in the eyes of those who owned the machines. The complete reordering of people’s experience of time began with work but soon extended to every aspect of cultural and individual life. Often lost in discussions of punching the clock is the fate of that most basic of human temporal encounters, the experience of night.
THE END OF NIGHT
“No previous time in Western history experienced such a sustained assault upon the nocturnal realm as did the period from 1730 to 1830”, wrote Roger Ekirch in his excellent At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. Living as we do in a world of twenty-four-hour illumination, we in the modern world find it difficult to recapture the extent of night’s hold on human consciousness. “Night was man’s first necessary evil”, Ekirch begins, “our oldest and most haunting terror. Amid the gathering darkness and cold, our prehistoric forbears must have felt profound fear.”48
Before industry reshaped human life, night was an elemental danger. Even the night air itself was thought to be thick and poisonous. The out of doors became hazardous as the fading of the sun’s rays drained light and colour from the world. “Shepherds all, and maidens fair”, wrote playwright John Fletcher in 1610, “fold your flocks up; for the air ’gins to thicken and the sun already his great course has run”.49 Doctors warned their patients to beware the “heavy vapours” of night. Physical health was not the only concern. In a prescientific age steeped in biblical lore and the certainty of demons and witchcraft, the night was a time of supernatural terrors. “Night belongs to the spirits”, held a proverb; John Fletcher wrote that it belonged to the “blacke spawne of darknesse”.50
Authorities, both religious and secular, had little power in the night and each home was counselled to become a small fortress. Cities and towns were fortified against night and its human dangers as well—many larger human habitations were surrounded by walls. The only way in and out of most cities at night was through fortified gates that were closed at sunset, watched over by guards and not reopened until dawn. But in the industrial age, these walls and gates were often torn down. What had once been protection from night terrors became a barrier to the efficient exchange of goods and materials that would need to continue, unabated, all night. “They are a relic of the past”, said an eighteenth-century writer surveying Bordeaux’s city walls and decrying them as a hindrance that must be “condemned by economic necessity”.51
Before industrialization, the fall of night meant returning home and turning to sleep. But even sleep, that most intimate and personal arena, would be transformed by the industrial revolution. While candles and wood fires had long provided artificial lighting, the illumination they yielded was weak. If you wanted more light, you needed more candles, which were not cheap.52 Thus, for much of our history, most hu
man beings experienced night as a long round of sleep that began shortly after the fall of darkness. But their sleep was not our sleep. Instead it was a kind of slumber that has been all but lost to us.
“First sleep” was its common name in Europe before the industrial revolution. “Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness”, writes Ekirch.53 Even the memory of this pattern is lost to us today. In our modern era we think being awake at night is a symptom of discord or difficulty—we have failed to get a “good night’s sleep”. But plays and diaries from Europe’s preindustrial age tell a story of a different pattern, where two periods of sleep divided by a period of wakefulness was the norm. “I believe ’tis past midnight, for I have gotten my first sleep”, wrote George Farquhar in his play Love and a Bottle (1698).54 Thus the experience of night and sleep, so fundamental to the way we experience time, was fundamentally different before the industrial age.
Even before industry changed everything, as the era of science and reason began in the 1600s, attitudes about night had begun to shift. Fear of “night vapours” became the superstitions of a previous age, and people were more apt to be out after hours for social or commercial reasons. But as the industrial revolution took hold at the end of the 1700s, the millennia-old experience of night was turned fully on its head. Material engagement, in the form of new technologies for lighting, would drive the change, sweeping night away in a blaze of illumination. “Since the invention of gas light, our evening life has experienced an indescribable intensification”, wrote a nineteenth-century diarist, “our pulse has accelerated, nervous excitation has been heightened; we have had to change our appearance, our behaviour and our customs, because they had to be accommodated to a different light.”55
Beginning with burning wood, the long history of lighting was, until the mid-eighteenth century, a story of few innovations. During the preindustrial period, the candle and oil lamp represented the greatest inventions past pitch-covered torches. The first important departure in lighting technology came in Paris in 1760. In 1763, the Académie des Sciences held a competition for the development of a new light source to illuminate the city’s crime-ridden streets.56 The invention that followed was called the réverbère or reflector lantern. Using an oil-burning base with several wicks backed by two reflectors, the réverbère was many times brighter than ordinary lanterns of the time. As réverbères were deployed across Paris the results were hailed as a revolution. “Now the city is extremely bright lit”, wrote one commentator. “The combined force of 1,200 réverbères creates an even, lively and lasting light.”57
In truth, the lighting from the réverbères would seem pale by today’s standards, but their connection with state authority via the police (they were often called police lanterns) made the populace feel as though the dangers of night had been pushed away. During the French Revolution the lanterns themselves would become symbols of the hated monarchical state. The practice of tearing down and smashing lanterns in political uprisings (vividly described in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables) became a favourite activity of would-be revolutionaries that continued up until the introduction of gas lighting.58 The 1848 revolution against the Hapsburg monarchy is most strikingly remembered for the destruction of gaslight poles in Vienna and the ensuing pillars of fire erupting into the city’s night of chaos.59
The widespread use of gas lighting marked the first real step into night’s new day. Introduced at the turn of the nineteenth century, street lamps burning coal gas provided illumination ten times brighter than the réverbères. First appearing in 1807 on London’s Pall Mall, gas lamps—more than forty thousand of them—would soon light two hundred miles of London’s streets.60 Other cities across Europe and America quickly adopted the new gas technology as a vast infrastructure of gasworks linking underground pipes to street lamps was set in place. Massive gasometers with capacities of thirty thousand cubic metres (a million cubic feet) or more were routine by the 1860s, becoming visibly potent symbols of industrial progress.61 More visible, however, was the nightscape. Where the city at night once meant only danger to body and soul, gaslight engendered a new, more cheerful nightlife. As an 1829 visitor to London described the new face of night, “Thousands of lamps, in long chains of fire, stretch away to enormous distances. The display of the shops, lighted up with peculiar brilliancy, . . . is most striking in effect. The streets are thronged with people, and thousands of elegant equipages roll along to the appointed dinner-hour party.”62
People were out, shops were open and night had been vanquished. But those shops needed merchandise, and here too, in manufacturing, gas lighting triumphed. The widespread use of gas lighting in factories allowed bosses to add night shifts. Production was now continuous and workers could clock in at midnight, keeping machines running on well-lit shop floors through the long hours till dawn.63
Electricity scored the final victory over night. When Thomas Edison presented his carbon filament lamp (lightbulb) at the Paris Electrical Exhibition in 1881, it was instantly hailed as the light of the future.64 By 1882, the first central electricity-generating stations were operational in London and New York.65 Electric lighting rapidly spread into factories, streets and, most important, homes. The last of these inroads was crucial in changing the human experience of night and time. The unpleasant smell and very real possibility of poisoning or explosion had made bourgeois households slow to admit gas lighting. But as one commentator wrote, “All doors were open to electric light.”66 Electric illumination was hailed as not only superior to gaslight but also good for the health. “Electricity was regarded as positively beneficial, almost as a sort of vitamin.”67
FIGURE 4.4. Artifical lighting steals the stars. By the late 1800s, night was becoming day in the cities of Europe and America. Gas light, followed by electrical illumination, became commonplace, profoundly changing the experience of time by altering every aspect of human life including sleep.
By the turn of the twentieth century, night and its ancient habits had vanished in the cities. Brightly lit factories ran twenty-four hours a day.68 Brilliantly illuminated cities carried on their business under the unswerving arc of a thousand electric suns. Brightly lit homes allowed their inhabitants to substitute work or entertainment for rest. The quaint terms “first sleep” and “second sleep” disappeared. And, all the while, the great rush to turn darkness into day left growing multitudes of city dwellers unaware of what they had lost. The glare of artificial lighting blotted out all but the brightest stars and robbed even those beacons of their vividness and mystery. Scientists, on the other hand, had begun to claim the night sky for themselves, opening windows deeper into the universe and taking their first halting steps towards a truly scientific cosmology.
COSMIC HEAT DEATH AND THE ARROWS OF TIME: COSMOLOGY ADDS THERMODYNAMICS
Newton and his theories were a step ahead of the technologies that would define his age. Thermodynamics, the grand theoretical vision of the nineteenth century, operated in the other direction with practice leading theory. The sweeping concepts of energy, heat, work and entropy, which thermodynamics (and its later form, statistical mechanics) would embrace, began first on the shop floor. Originally the domain of engineers, thermodynamics emerged from their engagement with machines. Only later did this study of heat and its transformation rise to the heights of abstract physics and, finally, to a new cosmological vision.
Thermodynamics is a science of systems. If that term seems generic and abstract, it is meant to be. A system is any collection of interacting parts. The great beauty of thermodynamics is its applicability to any and all systems: mechanical, biological, celestial. Proposed as a universally valid theory of energy and its changes, thermodynamics would prove as useful for stars as it was for steam engines. With work extending across the nineteenth century, scientists such as Sadi Carnot in France, Rudolf Clausius in Germany, Willard Gibbs in the United States and
Ludwig Boltzmann in Austria laid out a new theoretical framework for change and time. These new laws allowed scientists to see general principles of evolution at work even in the most complex systems. And evolution was the key—it became the watchword for the new century and its science. The core of thermodynamics was its ability to map the evolution of systems to the flow of energy. This emphasis on change and transformation allowed the new science to offer the first scientific explanation for the flow of both personal and cosmic time.
Thermodynamics added two new laws to the rule book of physics. Its first law tells us that the total amount of energy in a closed system is always conserved. The adjective closed simply means the system is isolated from the rest of the universe. Energy can take many forms: motion, gravity, magnetism and more. It can flow from one form to another just as a dropped stone converts gravitational energy into the energy of downward motion. But the first law of thermodynamics tells us that no matter what transformations occur, the total amount of energy you begin with must be the same quantity with which you end.
Of particular importance to nineteenth-century physicists was the recognition that heat was just another form of energy. In a return to the Greek ideas of Democritus and others, the atomic hypothesis was raised once again. Temperature was eventually seen as nothing more than a direct measure of the random motions of atoms. The dropped stone will feel slightly warmer after it impacts the ground because the energy of its “bulk” motion (the stone as a whole moving downwards) is converted into the random motions of its atoms when it slams into the pavement. By understanding and including heat in its inventory of energy, thermodynamics was born as science.
The first law of thermodynamics—“Energy is conserved”—was not a difficult principle to understand. The all-powerful second law, however, was something new indeed, and it added an entirely new conception of time and evolution to the framework of the cosmos.
