Talking sky, working stone and living field : from prehistory to the agricultural revolution -- The city, the cycle and the epicycle : from the urban revolution to a rational universe -- The clock, the bell tower and the spheres of God : from the medieval monastery to the renaissance cosmos -- Cosmic machines, illuminated night and the factory clock : from Newton's universe to thermodynamics and the Industrial Revolution -- The telegraph, the electric clock and the block universe : the imperatives of simultaneity from time zones to Einstein's cosmos -- The expanding universe, radio hours and washing machine time : speed, cosmology and culture between the world wars --The Big Bang, Telstar, and a new Armageddon : the nuclear big bang's triumph in a televised space age -- Inflation, cell phones and the outlook universe : information revolutions and the big bang gets in trouble -- Wheels within wheels : cyclic universes and the challenge of quantum gravity : eternal time through repeating time -- Ever-changing eternities : the promise and perils of a multiverse : eternal inflation, arrows of time and the anthropic principle -- Giving up the ghost : the end of beginnings and the end of time : cosmology's radical alternatives in three acts -- In the fields of leaning grass : ending the beginning in human and cosmic time

"The Big Bang is dead and astrophysicist Adam Frank explains how our experience of time will change as a result"--