Slashdot Mirror
A Clock That Runs for 10,000 Years
Justin Blanton writes "Discover magazine is running an article about a clock designed to run accurately for 10,000 years. It's essentially a "future-proof" clock that blurs the line between art and functionality through advanced engineering. From the article: 'Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis.'"
I've already made one of these. If you don't believe me, you're more than welcome to come back in 500 years to check it. Na nana boo boo
And they don't have a power source either.
And obviously even if it gets "designed", there's no way to actually test it. There will be functions that are only exercised every 4,000 years, so those parts will be mighty hard to test under realistic conditions. How do you design a mechanical flip-flop that has to sit still for 4,000 years, then flip?
And they apparently don't have a good time reference! No atomic clock, as they tend to run out of cesium atoms after a few years. It's apparently meant to be locked to the Sun, but that's not a particularly *good* clock. Even now we have to occasionally add a leap-second to keep roughly in sync with the Sun. And locking to the Sun is problematical, as the Earths' axis precesses a bit, changing local noon on a roughly 18,000 year cycle.
So not to put too fine a point on it, should we really be impressed by a very sketchy design, and very partial prototype, for a useless, marketless, and probably unbuildable gadget that won't tell time all that well anyway?