Back in Time ($7.99) is an ambitious effort to encapsulate the entire span of history from the Big Bang to the present in a single iPad app. Although the individual sections are concise, the app does well in terms of presenting the history of the Universe, the Earth, and humanity in a comprehensible scale. It's not a research tool, as it paints its subjects in broad strokes and leaves out numerous topics, but it can inspire people to explore the many subjects it touches on. Delving into Back in Time is a good way to appreciate not just human history, but also the development of life on Earth, the formation of our planet, solar system, galaxy, and the universe itself, as well as the interconnectedness of events.
Slicing and Dicing History
In illustrated essays, the app touches on a series of milestones and pivotal events. The most recent topics covered include the human genome, the manned Moon landings, World War I, World War II, and the Industrial Revolution. Each entry comprises about six paragraphs, so they are overviews that try to put the event into historical perspective. Of necessity, many worthy topics are left out. For instance, a big omission is our current age of computers, connectivity, and information.
In an attempt to present astronomical, geological, and historical timescales in a fathomable way, the app has a Clock mode that treats the span of time since the Big Bang as if it were a single 24-hour period. By this scale, our species, Homo sapiens—which is about 195,000 years old—emerged at 23:59:58.770, or just 1.23 seconds before midnight, while the dinosaurs went extinct at around 7 minutes to midnight. This is a variation on the Cosmic Calendar, a concept popularized by Carl Sagan in his Cosmos TV series, which condenses all of history into one year. (Back in Time's 24-hour clock breaks the clock's time into intervals as fine as a thousandth of a second, compared with the Cosmic Calendar, whose smallest interval is a second.)
In Clock mode, you see a virtual representation of an analog clock with a round face and gears whirring inside. It has movable hour and minute hands and, when you get close to the present day, a second hand. By moving the hands, you can go backward and forward in time. As it's a 12-hour clock, you need to go twice around its dial to encompass the entire span of time since the Big Bang. When you release the hands, they move and stop at the beginning of the nearest event covered in the app. For instance, if you move the clock from midnight back 6 hours, to 6 p.m., the time counter, which records how far back in time you've gone, reads 3.42 billion years ago. Releasing the clock hands (by removing your finger from the tablet screen) takes you further back, to 3.8 billion years ago to the event known as the Origin of Life, or 5:21 p.m. according to the clock hands.
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Navigating with the clock is a good way to conceptualize an immense span of time, and the clock hands were responsive in testing. Still, for navigating the app, I prefer the event-oriented Timeline view, with its carousel of thumbnails that lets you easily locate specific events covered in the app.
To the left of the clock is a vertical menu containing six items, with the top two set off from the rest. The top item names the historical event covered in the app closest in time to the time the clock is set to, and the item below it, the aforementioned time counter, tells how many years ago the clock is set to. For instance, if you move the second hand back to 15 seconds before midnight (which represents today), the top line reads Tools (Homo Habilis), and the second line reads 2.3 million years ago.
The other items in the menu are links to sections titled Introduction, About, Settings, and Instructions. The Introduction explains the clock, and notes "…Every person you have ever heard of, every civilization, every monument, every war, the rise and fall of all empires, every written word…it all happened here, in this final second…" It also gives a time scale for the clock, noting that 1 second equals 159,000 years, 1 minute is 9.5 million years, 1 hour is 570 million years, and 1 day is 13.7 billion years (the current estimate for the age of the universe).
The About section lists contributors, image sources, and credits. Settings lets you control the music volume, as well as change the language of the text to Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, or Chinese. The Instructions section is a guide to navigating the Clock view, the Timeline page, and the individual event entries.
Timelines and Thumbnails
Clicking on either of the top two entries (Event or Time) on a page takes you to a different view, which introduces another, more efficient way to navigate. Part of the clock, greatly reduced in size, is still visible in the lower right, and you can click on it if you want to return to the Clock view. Across the bottom of the screen is a horizontal timeline, in our example centered on 2.3 million years ago and once again naming Homo habilis, the first known tool makers. Stretching across the screen are a series of images that start at the lower left with a stone tool, once again labeled Tools (Homo habilis).
Moving to the right, the images represent events farther back in time: Cradle of Humankind, then the K-T Extinction (the destruction of the dinosaurs), Origin of Birds, First Mammals, Rise of the Dinosaurs, and (the supercontinent) Pangaea. You can swipe the string of images carousel-style to move forward (to the right) or backward (to the left) in time, which will in turn reveal a different part of the timeline. You can also swipe the timeline in the same fashion to move forward or backward in time, and the icons will move accordingly.
Homing in on Events
Clicking on one of the images takes you to its Event page, which includes an essay describing what the image represents and its historical importance, and includes related images (photos, illustrations, and artwork). For instance, the Tools (Homo habilis) page describes these hominids, the first known toolmakers, who left traces of their handiwork in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and whose relation to modern humans is uncertain. (They may or may not have been our direct predecessors.) Related photos show a skull, some early tools, and a photo of Olduvai Gorge.
Below the images is a toolbar with six icons. The first three are a circled X flanked by forward and back arrows. Clicking the X icon takes you back to the Timeline view, and the arrows take you to the Event pages nearest in time, backwards in our example to Cradle of Humankind, and forward to Fire (Homo erectus). The fourth icon consists of several vertical lines representing a timeline, but it's not the main navigational timeline. Instead, it focuses on the subject of the Event page; for Homo habilis, the timeline shows the span of time in which various hominid species existed, up until Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and humans (Homo sapiens), and highlighting some related events (evidence for controlled fire, the exodus from Africa, and the oldest cave paintings).
Clicking the fifth toolbar icon, a question mark, reveals several facts about the Event; for instance, habilis was used to indicate the skilled handling of tools, that other animals such as primates, birds, elephants, and dolphins can also use tools, and that Homo habilis was once thought to be the oldest species of the genus Homo. The sixth icon, a video play button, launches an animation (which also appears when you open the Event page), in this case a spear, which flies across the screen to embed itself in the screen's right-hand edge and disappear after a few seconds.
Conclusion
Back in Time does a credible job in trying to present all of history in the broadest strokes. The app is impressive for its scope, if not its depth. The event pages, though well-written and informative, are concise, and present only a brief overview of the topics they cover. A lot of things are left out, such as the information age and the development of modern medicine.
That said, Back in Time is beautiful and well designed, and I had no operational problems in testing the app. It's a good choice if you're a history student or a history buff, not so much for investigating particular topics, but for getting a better idea of the progression of history the interconnectedness of events, and our place in the vast time scale of our universe.
Back in Time is a beautiful iPad app that presents a capsule view of the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the sequencing of the human genome.
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