About Time

by Adam Frank

  HOW THOUGHTS AND THINGS MAKE A WORLD

  Exploring the centrality of clock synchronization and simultaneity in Einstein’s evolution towards relativity, Peter Galison asked the central question: “Was no one else in 1904–1905 in fact asking what it meant for an observer here to say that a distant observer was watching a train arrive at 7 o’clock?”28

  The answer Galison provided—the answer we have explored in this chapter—is simple. In one way or another, the entire culture of the late nineteenth century was asking questions about simultaneity. Passengers riding swift trains from one city to another, families sending telegrams to distant relatives, mayors contemplating the co-ordination of town clocks, generals running military exercises synchronized by rail and wire—each in his or her own way was consciously, or unconsciously, asking this question.

  Einstein grew up with the question. Electromagnetic clock co-ordination even appeared in one of the young man’s favourite childhood science books.29 By the time he reached the patent office, Einstein was in the thick of his culture’s confrontation with simultaneity, clocks and time. As Galison wrote, “Reviewing one patent drawing after another in the Bern office, Einstein had a grandstand seat for the great march of modern technologies.”30 It is no accident that the technologies Einstein reviewed were aimed directly towards reworking our uses of, and material engagements with, time.

  The theory of relativity revolutionized the meaning of temporality for physics and, as we shall explore in the next chapter, allowed the first true scientific cosmology to emerge. But the newly emerging relativistic time had its origins firmly rooted in the concrete concerns of human time. Train tracks and telegraph lines reshaped human culture. It was a radical new form of material engagement and from it would flow new institutional facts that radically, and rapidly, reshaped human culture. As Galison put it,

  Creating this standardized, procedural time was a monumental project that utilized creosote-soaked poles and undersea cables. It required a technology of metal and rubber, but also reams of paper, bearing, contesting, and sanctifying local ordinances, national laws, and international conventions. As a result, conventional, turn-of-the-century time synchronization never inhabited a place isolated from industrial policy, scientific lobbying, or political advocacy.31

  Thus, from our material encounter with the world—our making of new things—new symbols and new ways of thinking emerged. These new cognitive possibilities flow both downwards, to transform everyday time, and upwards, to the realms of philosophy, physics and eventually cosmology.

  The story of relativity’s emergence is a pure example of human and cosmic time braiding together through the process of material engagement. While the myth speaks of Einstein wrestling alone with the realms of pure abstraction, the truth is far more interesting.

  When we looked at the Neolithic revolution, we saw how symbols emerging from material engagement could transform human experience. What was true ten thousand years ago is true of the past century and is just as true now. Synchronized time was itself a potent symbol during Einstein’s day. The cultural push for a single co-ordinated time invoked discussions of democracy and world citizenship. Relativity, with its emphasis on individual frames of reference and the primacy of each observer, became a symbol as well. “What all these symbols held in common”, writes Galison, “was a sense that each clock signified the individual, so that clock co-ordination came to stand in for a logic of linkage among people and peoples that was always flickering between the literal and the metaphorical. Precisely because it was abstract-concrete (or concretely abstract), the project of time co-ordination for towns, regions, countries, and eventually the globe became one of the defining structures of modernity.”32

  In the next chapter we step forward into the twentieth century and the story of true scientific cosmology. It is a story that will lead us to our own precipice and potential revolutions in human and cosmic time. But before we take that step we must remember the critical role time has always played in the cultural transformations of the past. We have always made time and, in turn, our understanding of time in the universe has made us. Now we are at it once again.

  Chapter 6

  THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE, RADIO HOURS AND WASHING MACHINE TIME

  Speed, Cosmology and Culture Between the World Wars

  PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, USA • 1935, 2:25 P.M.

  The whistle would blow soon. There couldn’t be much of her break left. The clatter from the assembly line wasn’t making it much of a break anyhow. If she had a watch, she would know how much time she had, but of course she’d sold that long ago just to keep her and her boy in the house. The watch had been the last vestige of her earlier life, given to her by her husband during those years of wealth. At least those years felt like wealth now, with the whole country slipping to God knows where. But the factory clock would make sure she was back on the line in time.

  The ’29 crash had killed what was left of her husband’s business and the resulting sorrow took him as well a year later. So now here she was, a single mother working the line assembling Westinghouse washing machines and doing piecework at night to keep her and her boy whole.

  She was so tired. She had got up early to finish the wash and hang the laundry before she got the boy off to school. The irony of putting shiny new electric washing machines together all day when she was forced to do most of her own by hand was not lost on her. She was saving up to use her employee discount to buy one of the machines she spent each day putting together. But something always came up and the money always disappeared. Still she was grateful to have a job. Someday things would be better and she would have more time.

  The shrill blast of the whistle jolted her out of the reverie. Back to the shift; back to the lines. Another two hours and forty-five minutes. She just had to get through two hours and forty-five minutes.

  ELECTRIC SLAVES AND WASHING MACHINE TIME

  Before electric appliances radically reshaped life and time at home, Monday was wash day, and it was called “blue Monday,” for good reason: a bluing agent, added to rinse water to brighten clothes, gave the day its name. But the struggle involved in hand washing lent its own meaning to the blues. In Never Done, a history of housework, Susan Strasser describes the process in the early days:

  FIGURE 6.1. Father Time puzzles over General Electric’s “Monitor top” refrigerator. Introduced in 1927, the “Monitor top” was one of the first fridges to see widespread use. It was a powerful example of electric appliances changing day-to-day experience and the common experience of time.

  Without running water, gas, or electricity, even the most simplified hand-laundry process consumed staggering amounts of time and labour. One wash, one boiling, and one rinse used about fifty gallons of water—or four hundred pounds [180 kilograms]—which had to be moved from pump or well or faucet to stove and tub, in buckets and wash boilers that might weigh as much as forty or fifty pounds. Rubbing, wringing, and lifting water-laden clothes and linens, including large articles like sheets, tablecloths, and men’s heavy work clothes, wearied women’s arms and wrists and exposed them to caustic substances. They lugged weighty tubs and baskets full of wet laundry outside, picked up each article, hung it on the line, and returned to take it all down; they ironed by heating several irons on the stove and alternating them as they cooled, never straying far from the hot stove.1

  This was time and material engagement at its most fundamental level. Negotiating the human world of culture demanded clean clothes, but clothes required enormous amounts of time to clean. As electric currents began circulating through a world that was re-inventing itself from one year to the next, this most basic encounter with time would soon leave the realm of hands-on work and move into the domain of automation.

  Machines for washing clothes have a long history. The earliest versions were hand-driven contraptions that imitated the tedium of rubbing clothes over a washboard. A lever, pulled by hand, drove two curved ribbed surfaces over each other with th
e clothes placed in between.2 One such model, built in Manchester, debuted at the Great London Exhibition of 1862. The first electric clothes washers appeared in 1900.3 These were basically motor-rotated tubs filled with water by hand, but the water would often run over the tub into the motor, delivering jolting shocks to its operator. The next thirty years were a story of manufacturers learning, step-by-step, how to transfer power from sufficiently muscular motors into enclosed washing mechanisms without electrocuting the customer.

  Important steps were made in the 1920s, including U.S. appliance maker Maytag’s adoption of the “agitator in a tub technology”, which is still used, and the development of the modern look of the machine.4 The familiar white enamelled sheet metal so recognizable today replaced the copper tubs and wrought-iron legs of previous washing machine incarnations. The sheet-metal skirt was eventually dropped below the level of the motor mount to encase the entire apparatus in one smooth-looking unit.

  In 1937 the Bendix Home Appliances Corporation, founded in Indiana a year earlier by legendary salesman Judson Sayre, introduced the first fully automatic front-loading washing machine. The Bendix machine did it all—wash, rinse and spin. Women who just a generation before had spent days doing laundry could now simply load it, start it and leave it. The mind-numbing monotony and physical exhaustion associated with wash day was over. So powerful was the transformation in time wrought by this most mundane of technologies that more than one study has pointed to the electric washing machine as a precursor to the revolutionary women’s liberation movement.5

  Electrical appliances popped up like daisies in the 1920s and 1930s, altering the temporal landscape, especially in America. Electric vacuum cleaners, invented by a janitor who later loaned a version to his cousin Susan Hoover and her entrepreneur husband, shortened the daily task of sweeping and the more odious work of hauling carpets outside for beating.6 Electric mixers, like the inexpensive Mixmaster, introduced in 1931, eliminated the hand kneading of dough.7 With the advent of electric refrigerators, hauling heavy slabs of ice from the icehouse to the kitchen also faded to memory. Even intimate acts such as shaving gave way to electrification as the first mass-market shavers appeared in the early 1930s.8

  In America, 60 percent of the 25 million homes wired for electricity in 1940 had a washing machine—a tremendous proportion for a nation still struggling with the aftermath of the Depression.9 But the second part of this statistic, about the number of homes with electricity, is just as important as the first. From the 1920s to World War II the washing machine was just one of a host of home appliances reshaping the human experience of time by compressing housework, and these appliances needed electricity. It was electricity—the fruit of the previous century’s scientific breakthroughs now becoming technology—that powered this radical, cultural reconfiguration.

  America was well ahead of Britain in adopting electricity in the home. Immediately after World War I, in 1920, less than 10 percent of U.K. households had electricity, compared to 34 percent of all U.S. households.10 By 1940, the U.S. proportion had doubled,11 and in rural areas the number of households with electric power increased by a factor of almost thirty.12 Electric power running to almost every home created a redistribution of work and time that was without precedent in all the long millennia that had preceded it. With electric power running appliances, each family had the equivalent of a small army of servants doing their vacuuming and their sewing, preserving their food, washing their dishes and of course cleaning and drying their clothes. Electric appliances reshaped the experience of daily time and created a new, mass-market vision of leisure.

  Companies trying to sell these appliances to the lucrative American market were quick to find novel ways to advance the vision of life without housework. In 1928 the magazine Modern Revelation, under the auspices of the National Electric Light Association, offered a prize for the best essay on living with electrical appliances. In her winning essay, Wilma Cary compared the downtrodden, old-fashioned Joyce to her more modern neighbour, Mrs Stuart:

  Joyce believes that Mrs Stuart must be a terrible housekeeper [because she is often not home] until Joyce visits her neighbor one day. During this visit Joyce discovers that Mrs Stuart’s secret is household appliances. With the assistance of these “electric servants” Mrs Stuart is able to keep her house spotless, the laundry washed and ironed, and take her children on daily excursions. After having completed all these chores, Mrs Stuart can still make a delicious dinner for her husband on her electric stove. Amazing! Joyce sees the light and decides to persuade her husband to purchase these appliances for her to make her life easier and more enjoyable.13

  This was the new electric world. What sane woman, man or child could want anything else?

  Every aspect of the human universe was reshaped by the injection of this new current into daily life. In cities and town squares across America, electric lights blotted out the stars and turned night into day. Electrical appliances alleviated the drudgery of housework. Electricity even gave radio tubes their glow as they stitched the nation together through the voices of Rudy Vallee or President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  In the cold night air of Mount Wilson, California, electricity was also at hand, running the motors that kept the giant 2.5-metre Hooker telescope turning gracefully in step with the wheeling stars, radically expanding the frontiers of astronomers’ cosmic vision.

  REALM OF THE NEBULA: ASTRONOMY STEPS INTO COSMOLOGY

  Throughout the nineteenth century astronomers made steady progress mapping the sky. But it was not until the first decades of the twentieth century that the fundamental data of astronomy became relevant to cosmological debates. The transition was made possible because of the industrialization of telescopes (in scale if not in quantity).

  A telescope is, for all intents and purposes, a light bucket. Stars appear fainter the farther they are from us.14 Thus astronomers needed to build ever bigger telescopes to probe deeper into the night and further into the realms of cosmic architecture. The 2.5-metre Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson was a triumph of industrial-scale design and scientific precision.15 The new technologies of electrification played their role in this domain as well: cables ran up the dangerous mountain roads to feed powerful motors that turned the dome and wound the precision timers for the telescope. Weighing more than fifty-four tonnes, the telescope itself was a massive construction of steel and glass that pushed the limits of technology. The enormous mirror, polished to microscopic smoothness, allowed astronomers such as Edwin Hubble to see objects that were a thousand times fainter and millions of times more distant than ever before.

  With so much power, the Hooker was the perfect instrument to answer a single question that had plagued astronomy for more than 150 years: What is the true nature of the Milky Way? Understanding the Milky Way was a critical first step in directly addressing the great questions of cosmology. Without a foothold on its size, shape and nature, it was impossible to form links between the yet unborn science of cosmology and the mature science of astronomy.

  Before artificial light robbed us of our experience of the night sky, all humans were familiar with the Milky Way. This sky-spanning arch of diffuse light is the most striking feature of the Earth’s night-time panorama. While some Greek astronomers had speculated about the nature of the Milky Way, there was little that could be done with the naked eye to explore it further. The first great leap in understanding occurred with Galileo. When he trained his small telescope on the Milky Way’s dispersed band of light, it was instantly resolved into countless points. The Milky Way, Galileo discovered, was a vast system of stars.

  Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries astronomers with ever-larger telescopes attempted to gaze farther and decipher the underlying geometry of the Milky Way as a stellar system. In 1784, after painstakingly counting the density of stars in different regions of the sky, William Herschel claimed that the Milky Way was shaped like a long thin bar with the sun positioned at the centre. Using similar met
hods a century and a half later, Dutch astrophysicist Jacobus Kapteyn concluded in 1922 that the Milky Way was like a squashed beach ball—an “oblate spheroid”—with the sun offset from the centre.16

  The true shape of the Milky Way was really only one-half of a pair of questions astronomers were struggling to answer. The Milky Way’s dimensions were of equal concern. How big was this ubiquitous stellar city? By Kapteyn’s era in the early twentieth century, methods for determining astrophysical distance were becoming more sophisticated and more reliable. Kapteyn’s best estimates set the Milky Way’s girth from one end to the other at more than 100,000 light-years (a light-year spans almost 10 trillion kilometres).

  Size mattered to these astronomers for a simple reason. As the twentieth century got under way, they wondered if the Milky Way and the universe were synonymous. It was quite possible that all the stars in the universe belonged to the Milky Way. If that was true, then the Milky Way, surrounded by an infinite void, was the material cosmos.

  It was also possible that other star systems similar to the Milky Way in size and character existed as distant “island universes”. The veracity of this island universe theory was a point of contentious debate among astronomers at the time. As the giant Hooker telescope was being constructed, the astronomical community had splintered into different sides of what was called the Great Debate. The heart of the question revolved around a class of astronomical objects known as spiral nebulae.

  When astronomical surveys in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carried out an exhaustive census of the sky’s inhabitants, they found more than just stars and planets. Diffuse, cloudy objects called nebulae (Latin for “clouds”) also showed up. Some nebulae were round and smooth. Some were irregular and spiky. But it was the enigmatic pinwheel-armed spiral nebula, first discovered in 1845, that garnered the most attention.17 When seen edge-on, these spiral nebula often had a clear disc-like appearance.18