Stephen Hawking Unveils "Time Eater" Clock

gyrogeerloose writes "Stephen Hawking unveiled an unsettling clock in Cambridge on Friday. Designed by John Taylor — a British horologist and inventor whose thermostatic switch is incorporated in millions of electric appliances worldwide — the clock was conceived as a tribute to another British inventor, John Harrison. Harrison invented the grasshopper escapement in the early 18th Century, which resulted in extremely accurate mechanical time keeping and was instrumental in solving the Longitude Problem. Taylor's clock, which in entirely mechanical in operation but has no hands, uses a fearsome-looking 'demon grasshopper' as its escapement. 'I... wanted to depict that time is a destroyer — once a minute is gone you can't get it back' Taylor said. 'That's why my grasshopper is not a Disney character. He is a ferocious beast that over the seconds has his tongue lolling out, his jaws opening, then on the 59th second he gulps down time.' It also (purposely) only tells correct time once every five minutes. An excellent video of the clock in action, with an explanation of its workings by its inventor, is available on YouTube."

Comments

It's art.

[DogDude]

Ok, so it's a piece of art of dubious merit. Neat. Why's it on Slashdot?

Re:beautiful but

[Anonymous Coward]

SECOND POST!

I personally think that time is an illusion.

Lunch time doubly so.

I read that in a Reader's Digest magazine.

Nice, hey?

Why is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, what the shit? Stephen Hawking has nothing to do with this idiots shitty clock. There's -nothing- even remotely interesting about this pile of shit. You realize this is just an ugly clock with lights instead of hour hands, right? Get this crap off the front page....

Hawking Is a Time Travel-Believing Crackpot

[Anonymous Coward]

Steven Hawking might as well be Paris Hilton. He believes that time travel is possible because (he claims) it is not contradicted by Einstein's General Relativity and yet, it is well known that nothing can move in spacetime because time is not a variable.

There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as "moving through" space-time, or as "following along" their world-lines. Rather, particles are just "in" space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.

From "Relativity from A to B" by Dr. Robert Geroch, U. of Chicago

Note also that Sir Karl Popper compared spacetime to Parmenides' myth of the unchanging block universe in which nothing ever happens and which, if we add another dimension, becomes Einstein's block universe (in which, too, nothing ever happens, since everything is, four-dimensionally speaking, determined and laid down from the beginning). Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations

In other words, contrary to what Steven Hawking claims, there is no time travel and general relativity does not allow it. Steven is a true blue crackpot, a little con artist in a wheelchair whose ex-wife felt that her duty as Hawking's wife was to remind him every day that he was not God. I'll say. It's hard to be God when you're making shit up that don't exist while you're all crumpled up in a wheelchair. If you even believe in the possibility of time travel, you are a crackpot. Steven is a full-blown time travel crackpot among other things. ahahaha....

Nothing Can Move in Spacetime

Re:Hawking Is a Time Travel-Believing Crackpot

[Anonymous Coward]

You can mod it down as much as you want but it's the truth. Truth hurts, doesn't it? ahahaha...

Whoop-de-shit.

[marxmarv]

I mean, really. If I want low-quality avant-garde nominally technological art pieces, I'll go to Makezine. That's why I don't.