Prologue: Beginnings and Endings ix
Chapter 1 Talking Sky, Working Stone and Living Field: From Prehistory to the Agricultural Revolution 1
Chapter 2 The City, the Cycle and the Epicycle: From the Urban Revolution to a Rational Universe 27
Chapter 3 The Clock, the Bell Tower and the Spheres of God: From the Medieval Monastery to the Renaissance Cosmos 56
Chapter 4 Cosmic Machines, Illuminated Night and the Factory Clock: From Newton's Universe to Thermodynamics and the Industrial Revolution 87
Chapter 5 The Telegraph, the Electric Clock and the Block Universe: The Imperatives of Simultaneity from Time Zones to Einstein's Cosmos 117
Chapter 6 The Expanding Universe, Radio Hours and Washing Machine Time: Speed, Cosmology and Culture Between the World Wars 144
Chapter 7 The Big Bang, Telstar and a New Armageddon: The Nuclear Big Bang's Triumph in a Televised Space Age 175
Chapter 8 Inflation, Cell Phones and the Outlook Universe: Information Revolutions and the Big Bang Gets in Trouble 209
Chapter 9 Wheels Within Wheels: Cyclic Universes and the Challenge of Quantum Gravity: Eternat Time Through Repeating Time 251
Chapter 10 Ever-Changing Eternities: The Promise and Perils of a Multiverse: Eternal Inflation, Arrows of Time and the Anthropic Principle 275
Chapter 11 Giving Up the Ghost: The End of Beginnings and the End of Time: Cosmology's Radical Alternatives in Three Acts 298
Chapter 12 In the Fields of Leaning Grass: Ending the Beginning in Human and Cosmic Time 316
Acknowledgments 339
Notes 343
Bibliography 373
Illustration Credits 389
Index 391