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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."
there has to be some sort of mechanism, a construct if you will, that keeps this clock going. it can not all be eating itself for it would not exist if it would. then how is it keeping time while eating itself? i find it hard to understand
That's just awesome. It looks like a grasshopper walking along the top. Lights spiral out from the center, until it reaches the creature, and then it starts again.
But it says that it doesn't have hands - it has LEDs all around it, which displays the time. I think that's pretty much the same thing, no?
Fnord.
What language is this nerd-speak?
keep the steampunk on boingboin and off of slashdot , thank you
For that much they could have at least made it a self-winding automatic. jeebus.
Ok, so it's a piece of art of dubious merit. Neat. Why's it on Slashdot?
I don't respond to AC's.
I know he might not be Paris Hilton, but he should be here on slashdot. It's STEPHEN HAWKING.
Steven Hawking? or Stephen Hawking??? I've never heard of a Steven Hawking
That is one minute of my life I'll never get back.
God spoke to me.
Misleading description...from TFA:
Yeah, so the only think Hawking had to do with this clock is: he was a guest at its unveiling.
And the clock itself really isn't much of a clock. The only mildly interesting thing about it is the "time eating" grasshopper that travels around the outside.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Is there a work-around here? I wanna see....
~
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....
John Taylor freely switches between general relativity and philosophical relativity. Don't watch if you get easily irked by such musing.
It is just like in the "old days" when the clocks were made by artisan-watchmakers and could be afforded by only the elite few. Something akin to Nuremberg eggs from the 16th century. http://www.love-watches.com/Invention-Watch.htm
Who tagged this "technology"? This is 100% art. It uses nothing more technologically noteworthy than a bunch of blue LEDs and a grasshopper escapement. The irritating blue LED has been annoying us as we try to sleep for the better part of a decade, and the grasshopper escapement is almost 3 centuries old. Personally, I think blue LEDs are generally the sign of an INFERIOR designer. Too many things nowadays have bright flashing blue LEDs for no other apparent reason other than "look! we have bright blue LEDs now!"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
helloooooo steampunk! needs more clockwork (no pun intended) and gearwork...
"When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, Grasshopper, then one minute has gone by."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
He blew it. He sould at least have used a carbon-arc and hundreds of mirrors and lenses.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
who woulda thunk that nigger was a liar?
...I thought it was going to demonstrate some sort of amazing breakthrough in physics.
Talk about a time eater, this post just ate my five minutes.
This clock would have fit right in with the sets for The Dark Crystal.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
... that the inventor isn't named "Reg"
Ok about 10 seconds after listening to Captian Picard tell Will Riker that someone said that time was a destroyer, but he believes time is a companion that goes with us (Star Trek Generations). I take a look at /. and look what i see.
"I [...] wanted to depict that time is a destroyer â" once a minute is gone you can't get it back".
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.
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
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.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Come on, this is slashdot. Do we need to articles about how to waste even more time?
They worship Hawking because Hawking believes in time travel. Slashdot nerds love all that Star-Trek physics crap. ahahaha...
Nothing in the video or the story indicates that the clock is only accurate once every five minutes. Where does that claim come from?
In fact, it appears that the clock is constantly accurate just like any "standard" clock.
Damn, I remember when this joint had drunken robot jokes. Damn kids! Get off my lawn!
Is it just me, or does the guy the the Youtube video sound exactly like Salad Fingers?
clearly become
I've got a Rb oscillator (and Efratom FRS, easily found for less than $200), which I will guarantee is much more accurate than any mechanical timekeeper. Stability of +- 1e-10/yr., which is better than 3 ms the first year, 6, the second, etc.
There's nothing in the article to indicate what it uses as a timebase, except a comment about an "electric motor." AC line frequency, the same as my bedroom alarm clock? European line frequency can vary by seconds per day.
Exactly what was your "guarantee," because I think you owe me.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It does appear to use blue leds - But there is no circuitry to control their 'flashing'.
This clock is a masterpiece of mechanical engineering.
The time is displayed with the lights by rotating a series of annular overlapping disks which have slots in them. The slots are precisely engineered in a "vernier" fashion, so they don't all line up at once, but only as the clock very subtly moves. There isn't a "seconds" hand, rather there is a "hand" that seems to rotate around the entire clock once per second, and it purely shows the rotation of the fastest outer annulus, with which the grasshopper escarpment engages.
The thing is, if this were purely "art" then it wouldn't work.
You're forgetting that all technologies are "art".
The defining feature that makes such things be labelled as tech rather than art is that tech works.
Tech doesn't just refer to "electronic". In fact if this clock were electronic, it would be one hell of a lot less impressive.
This clock works, (perhaps with a "bug" or two...) therefore it is tech. It doesn't "cop out" and use cheap and easy electronics, therefore it is impressive. It's designer shows he can make mechanical assemblies with such precision that it's dynamic motion can be used to keep time - a skill which is becoming rapidly lost with our current state of cheap electronics from China.
Is is Important Tech? Perhaps not, unless some circumstance conspires to require precise timekeeping in say an environment where electronics dare not go. Maybe some day we might need clocks that work near a lot of high energy ionising radiation, who knows.
I was annoyed that I forgot about this. I even walked about one street away from the unveiling near the time but I just wasn't thinking.
I'm going to take a look at it Monday on my way to work. It looks quite cool in the videos I've seen.
you actually can get the minutes back by reversing time.
There are real time eaters out there, they exist beyond three dimensions and exist in several dimensional space. If you saw how they really look, you'd go insane like I did when I first saw them.
First learn about super strings and then we can discuss how the universe and multiverse actually work. Hawking got a lot of things wrong, the Hawking paradox was but one of them and the information and matter and energy does not simply disappear, it ends up in a different dimension. One you Terrans have not discovered yet. But keep guessing, you'll find it eventually and then learn how to reverse time.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
do you get the Irony. The article said every minute passes is a minute you won't get back. this just took a minute out of my life. oh, the Irony... it kills us all
This belongs in Clive Barker's house.
Read the article, but don't quite understand why someone would make a clock that is so inaccurate?
...once every 5 minutes? Pray tell, why would that be? Not being new here, I made a valiant effort to not RTFAs, only to be drawn in by this teaser and succumb to the wiliest of temptations. Yes, I RTFAs, but I am no more enlightened than before...
I am really pissed of: Youtube has removed the video. Anyone has a mirror ? How come it always happen to me. 80% of the Youtube videos people send are taken down before i have time to watch them.
with no imagination
you jump to conclusions. Yes, it has an escapement. An escapement is just a mechanism to link the movement to something with periodicity. No, there isn't anything in the article to indicate that it is pendulum driven, or (as I said) exactly what it uses as a timebase.
Escapement timepieces without pendulums are common (e.g. most any mechanical wristwatch, which uses a balance wheel), people have corrected pendulums with atomic sources (typically using magnetics to delay or accelerate the pendulum).
It is actually you who are playing the smart ass, since you're obviously unaware of the full range of timekeeping mechanisms.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I mean, fundamentally, a giant mechanical clock with a large escapement on the outside functioning as both sculpture and working escapement is kind of cool, technologically.
Some of the variations that make this an art piece are also interesting technologically, though I haven't seen them all explained, mostly the ways it varies from operating in a purely predictable way "like clockwork". For example, the pendulum sometimes appears to catch slightly, the time lags backwards, then races ahead, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you like that clock you might also like antique pendulum wall clocks. I got into them a few years ago. There is just something about full mechanical clocks driven by weights. Ebay is a good starting place, something like these: http://tiny.cc/V5orM http://tiny.cc/vRuF7 http://tiny.cc/tFp5h
Notice how the intersection of the slots "moves" at a rate faster than the actual movement of the material having the slots. Now imagine something containing those slots moving at a speed approaching the speed of light relative to another stationary thing like it. You are located near the end the slot intersections are approaching. But from your perspective, the slot intersections would appear to be going away from you because the nearer intersection events arrive first.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
you mean, they could have at least made it a perpetual motion machine? automatic mechanical clocks are only available in watches because they are wound by an internal mechanism that is spun by very slight movements
> It doesn't "cop out" and use cheap and easy electronics, therefore it is
> impressive.
It "cops out" by using LEDs instead of doing something clever with mirrors and sunlight or similar. They're an ugly anachronism.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
NIGGERS NIGGERS NIGGERS!
You all are a bunch of NIGGERS.
Its a clock going on a building... that has to be readable at night...
Mirrors and sunlight won't hack it.
Cool, maybe, but this is a case of an engineer actually knowing, designing and building to the requirements, not what is cool.
The rotating cylinder, while an improvement in some respects, suffers from the same limitation as all other relativity compatible time travel schemes. You can only navigate to points in space time occupied by (certain areas of) the rotating cylinder. So while it would be cool to start one of these up, and maybe someone from the future could come out of it (unless future Luddites destroy it), it won't help to go back and change history.
And of course there is the usual practical caveat - the sheer size of the mass and energy required to try it out with humans. I have always maintained that time travel researchers need to forget about macroscopic time travel for a while - and focus on nano time travel. If a nano-scale time travel device capable of conducting photons or other particles can be constructed (a big if) - it can be done within reachable energy budgets for today. And information time travel would be amazing enough. Keep it secret and play the stock market to fund future development.
Of course, how do you know you can trust whoever is communicating with you through the device from the future? Maybe they want to ruin you to prevent the catastrophe caused by your device!
John Harrison's story chronicled in "Longitude" is the story of the greatest unsung hero of science and engineering since the Renaissance. Working on his own for nearly 50 years and in the face of fanatical opposition of the Board of Longitude Society he singlehandedly invented modern chronongraphy and all the particular horological advancements required up through the invention of electronic time pieces. To that end he solved the longitude problem which directly lead to British Naval supremacy as well as all commercial shipping and the advent of safe ocean passage without loss of life or cargo.
DOODILY DING DONG, TICK TOCK
DOODILY DING DONG, TICK TOCK
DOODILY DING DONG, TICK TOCK
DOODILY DING DONG, TICK TOCK
DOODILY DING DONG, TICK TOCK
Dethklok!
Dethklok!
Dethklok!
Dethklok!
I'm... ticking... for... the...
Dethklok!
Dethklok!
Skwisgaar Skwigelf taller than a tree,
Toki Wartooth not a bumblebee,
William Murderface Murderface Murderface,
Pickles the Drummer doodily doo ding dong doodily doodily doo,
Nathan Explosion.
from the hammers of the hellspawn, to the deep dark cliffs of the underworld, there lies a horrible thing, THE DETHKLOK
We're Serious!
The story of John Harrison and the accurate timepiece is actually really interesting - I'd strongly recommend the book Longitude for people interested in the history of technology.
Lol you guys sound like the people in South Park when Chef goes nanners about their flag depicting a black guy being hanged. When asked about it they go:
Man 4: [angry] Well, I think the flag is racist! [turns pensive] Huh, but then again, it is part of our history. ...but I can see how it is racist.
Man 5: Well, I guess the flag is part of history,
Man 6: [flatly, slowly] I think it is history. I think it is racist.
DAMN IT FOOL
this is the second time I see steVen hawking on this site instead of stePHen
is this a site for nerds or what? have you ever read anything by dr hawking?
this suxx!
how is it keeping time while eating itself? i find it hard to understand
"Time Eater" is a very misleading name. It should really be called a CLOCK GOBBLER.
It may be found about 400 light-years from here.
.
Guaranteed to kill any time-eating grasshopper. Or moth.
.
- aqk
F U
At 120 Watts, it should be called the "Energy Gobbler" instead.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112040/
and this too!
http://www.vincentguastiniproductions.com/LANGO1.jpg
Real scary man!!! I gotta get some sleep. Whoops!! I'm at work, shit!!!
http://www.vincentguastiniproductions.com/LANGO1.jpg
I shit my pants and ran like hell. Although the solution was to allow the weed to wear-off thus letting my mental state to re-sync itself in normal time. Stay away from fucking brownies!!!!!!
"which in entirely mechanical in operation but has no hands"
and we continue to squander and waste lavishly.
Way to go, you overly affluent, first world upper-classers!
This is on my route to work. Another bloody gaggle of tourists standing in the road for me to try to avoid mowing down with my bike.
AAAAAA Does this count as a First Post, then?
Cannot play media. Sorry, this media is not available in your territory.
WTF???
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
...all the more ridiculous.
Pendulum accuracy tops out about 1 s/month, unless it's a Shortt mechanism. Well designed quartz watches can do better.
Your attempt at using a red herring to distract attention from your incorrect and unsupported statement fails.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I don't care... It's probably a cool clock and all, but I just want to see some new physics. Keep this for high-society-UK section of slashdot plz.
If we keep on wasting time (and our energy) with stupid and useless applications like this there will be nothing left in the near future to waste our time with.
to code or not to code, that is the question.
A big flashy mostly useless clock made out of gold that only tells accurate time once every 5 minutes and the rest of the time just makes noise? You sure this thing is English? Sounds more French to me.