From Stonehenge to atomic clocks, this is how we’ve used science to work out the time across the centuries

‘Entertaining and engrossing’ Sean Carroll

Press the snooze button on your alarm once too often and you soon remember the importance of good timekeeping. That need to tell the time connects you to over five thousand years of human history, from the first solstice markers at Newgrange to quartz crystal oscillating in your watch today. Science underpins time: measuring the movement of Sun, Earth and Moon, and unlocking the mysteries of quantum mechanics and relativity theory – the key to ultra-precise atomic clocks.

Yet time is also socially decided: the Gregorian calendar we use today came out of fraught politics, while the ancient Maya used sophisticated astronomical observations to produce a calendar system unlike any other. In his quirky and accessible style, Chad Orzel reveals the wondrous physics that makes time something we can set, measure and know.

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'Full of history, physics and physicists... [a] varied book.’

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'An excellent book… [Orzel] has turned his gifts of clarity, logical exposition and gentle humour to explaining how different time systems have operated over the millennia… “Brief Histories of…” have multiplied ever since Stephen Hawking published his A Brief History of Time, but Orzel’s version is far more intelligible and entertaining that its bestselling predecessor… A Brief History of Timekeeping would be an ideal gift to satisfy anyone demanding to understand why clocks are such a perpetual source of fascination – and for those who are already convinced, it provides a succinct summary of the multiple ways in which time can be told.’