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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.
For that much they could have at least made it a self-winding automatic. jeebus.
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....
~
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.
"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.
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"
Come on, this is slashdot. Do we need to articles about how to waste even more time?
I dunno. I'm not one for the idle crap, but I kind of like this.
/. discusses Anathem. Not exactly pertaining to linux or science, but still an interesting bit of info likely to appeal to people interested in nerdy stuff.
I suppose it's the same reason
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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?
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
News for the tasteless, kitsch that matters.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
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.
Because it looks like one of those timepieces in Predator vs Alien, and some people are worried it's going to explode?
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...
You ignorant clod! As anyone from England can tell you, he's speaking in "Northern"!! :P
It's working for me. Are you using http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHO1JTNPPOU?
I put a copy of the video here for you for a while. Hurry up and get it before that server gets slashdotted.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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
Bizarely the video works from one of my other machines running Firefox 2.0.0.14, but not from my machine running Firefox 1.5.0.13. I tracked down the pb to a 403 Forbidden reply received from a *.googlevideo.com server for the URL http://v21.cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=pHO1JTNPPOU&origin=mia-v232.mia.youtube.com&signature=... Now go figure why one gets a 403 while the other streams the video just fine. I don't have time to debug youtube's website and their architecture make it difficult anyway (see the signature=xxx parmeter in the query string).
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
They have some of the craziest URLs on YouTube that I have seen. I can only imagine the huge nightmare of that design.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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
AC, I don't understand your use of the word "move" in the context of a spacetime object. When looking at Einstein's block universe, all "time travel" means is that a particular world-line is not a monoparametric function of t.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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.
The clock only tells the correct time once every 5 minutes. The rest of the time it can run fast, slow, pause, etc. You can see this in the video near the beginning where it slows down very drastically, or near the end when it chimes the hour and is just going back and forth a few times before advancing.
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.
Uh, cite?
Oh, and BTW... Stephen Hawking is so often right and others wrong that if he believes in the possibility of time travel I'm willing to take his word for it in the absence of contrary evidence.
And yes: He's admitted he was wrong before. More the better.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
no, we worship him cos he is the ultimate nerd, all he does is sit in a chair behind a computer all day. He never even gets up, he only moves 1 muscle to control his computer, he even communicates entirely through his computer all the time, that is something we can only aspire to.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
A running mechanical clock is correct never. A stopped mechanical clock is correct twice each day. Some would say a stopped clock is more accurate, and Einstein might agree.
Despite the obvious absurdity, I would have included works for geologic and astronomical time so the clock could (absent wear) show the correct time from The Beginning to The End. It would suit my Absurd Limit theory.
A clock that symbolically destroys current moments as the moving hand writes is outside both Einstein's philosophy and his works. Attaching his name to it does him an injustice. That "The moving hand writes and having writ, moves on" does not imply that the moment that just was exists no more. That moment travels out subjectively from its origin to the end of the universe at the speed of light at least. Some would say, and with this Einstein might demur, the moment that was not has some existence too, in some place we cannot see. With this last Schroedinger might agree. The difference could be argued by Cant and Liebowitz.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All you're doing is taking "change", like what is implicit when we talk about time, and reinterpreting it from a variable to a locus of its values over its entire domain.
There's a neat bit in Godel, Escher, Bach that illustrates this concept nicely, where he's got a picture of a dragon, which is cut up and folded into a 3d thing, and then a photo is taken of that 3d thing, and that photo is in turn cut and folded.
But in order for "time travel" to take place, all you need is a loop-de-loop shaped world-line. That world-line doesn't need to "move" in any meta-time sense.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Excuse me. I think you may have lost your train of thought here. I would suggest you check your meds.
General relativity does not consider - neither allow nor permit "time travel." To suppose it does so would be to presume that some specific mathematical theory could encompass and deny evey possible interpretation of that term, which would be ridiculous - in the definition of "made an object of ridicule".
Did you know that you can get a Phd in underwater basketweaving? Our current education system is broken and measuring what is true or not based on which degrees are offered or what grants you can get regarding the subject is perhaps naive.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
If you look superficially at the whole clock, it could be seen as a dubious art piece. If you looks closer at the workings, it is art and technology. The grasshopper escapement is very interesting mechanically and beautifully simple. The vernier slits in the rotating dics, which are used to allow the led light out at the correct time is very clever.
As a nerd I found this very very interesting and worthy of publication.
Are we only allowed to appreciate future technology, or can we be awe-stuck with the technological marvels of the past?
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
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.
One of my Dads physicist friends said of Hawking "he's never done enough original work to justify his reputation. He's just a populariser of other people's work. People only worship him because he looks like Davros".
Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!
What I like about this story is a tribute to John Harrison, one of the many smart people that Newton tried to destroy professionally.
Hawking who has Newton's job at Cambridge and wrote a great essay about Newton's nastiness
http://www.bluekaffee.com/topicview.php?post=1628670
So in an odd sort of way he's apologising to Harrison for being screwed by a previous Lucasian Professor. It's like the Vatican apologising to Galileo.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
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.
Note my nickname. I'm the one who submitted the article and I do not read either Digg or Reddit. I saw an article in my local paper, thought it might be something that Slashdot readers would like and wrote up a summary with links to the BBC Web site and YouTube. All copy-and-paste stuff was in quotes.
This ain't rocket surgery.
i'd like one of these in a garden or something
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.