IT'S ABOUT TIME!

A graphic tour of ways we measure and think about time, squired by (who else?) Albert Einstein.

Using non-mathematical language to explain the mind-bending ins and outs of time to young audiences constitutes a challenge, even with help from the world’s greatest scientist—a challenge that Brown meets with aplomb. He starts out with such easy stuff as the history of timepieces, from the 364 steps of the great pyramid at Chichén Itzá to John Harrison’s nautical clock and why we divide a day into 12 parts. (It has to do with knuckles, specifically ancient Egyptian ones.) Things get more complicated when Einstein describes how he revolutionized Newton’s and others’ notion that time moves at its own invariable speed with the counter-notion that because light has constant speed, the pace of time has to change, depending on how fast things go relative to one another. “Patience,” he counsels through his brushy mustache, marshalling such classic examples as a moving train with a stationary observer. “It will all make sense.” Thanks to Brown’s cogent explanations, it will, in time…and with some digging into the substantial appended bibliography. Along with brilliantly challenging readers to realize just how much remains to be learned about how our universe ticks, the author leaves them with further puzzlers to ponder, such as whether time comes with a beginning and an end. Humans are rare in the loose, spare cartoon art.

Expansive, engaging, and lucid.