deepens here. Just as hundredths of seconds flow faster than tenths of seconds, the speed of the falling sand is faster in the centre of the flow than at the edges, where it is slowed by its contact with the glass. The speed of “now,” in both chronometers, seems infinitely divisible into ever-faster increments.
There is a further parallel, not with my sports clock, but between the hourglass and time. Beyond the hourglass’s direct representation of time’s flow is the correspondence between the shape of the hourglass and the division of time into past, present and future. The reservoirs of future and past, the upper and lower bulbs respectively, are connected by the waist of the present. Perhaps the present moment, our “now,” is more exactly like the waist of the hourglass than we know. “Now” is unmoving, and instead, time rushes through it, giving us the illusory sense that the present moment races from the past towards the future, or that the future flows through it towards the past. Maybe the present moment is more like the lens of a projector that the film of time is playing through.
The hourglass has a final deep parallel with time. If, at the end of time, time reverses and the universe runs backwards, as an astophysicist named Thomas Gold has proposed, then turning the hourglass upside down after the “future” has run out is a perfect allegory. Perhaps the process repeats endlessly, the universe inverting like an egg timerin a kitchen morning after morning, or like the demon that Nietzsche wrote about (who, like Thomas Gold, we will encounter later on in this book). Finally, there is the analogy between mortality and time running out. The Grim Reaper doesn’t brandish his hourglass idly.
Mechanical clocks had, and still have, an element of mortality to them. Their measured ticks seem to dole out our lives. I remember how, when my mother was in her final days, she would keep glancing at her bedside clock. It was her compass, an absolute within the delerium that slowly overtook her. It was also a solace of sorts. I think the last control she could exercise over the world was to keep track of her daily calendar of events, of impending visits by her home-care nurse and the lonely hours of the night. Clocks are not the enemy, of course. They only measure our mortality. (Though neither are they our friend.) But the connection between clocks and mortality is strong nonetheless. It sometimes seems as if time stalks us, like the ticking clock in the stomach of the crocodile in Peter Pan.
I doubt that associations of mortality were a factor when clocks were a brand-new technology, when the chiming of the hours became a theme song to the cultural awakening of Europe in the sixteenth century. Still, the measurement of minutes was centuries away. Although the church had already instituted St. Bede the Venerable’s division of the hour into sixty minutes and the minute into sixty seconds, at least on paper, it wasn’t until Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1665 that accurate minutes became a reality and Bede’s abstractions became practicable. Huygens, the son of the famous Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens, was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. His invention of the pendulum clock was more of a practical necessity than an end in itself; he wanted to measure the motion of the planetsand their moons as precisely as possible. Eleven years later Ole Römer used Huygens’ pendulum to calibrate the occlusion of the moons of Jupiter and came up with the first quantitative estimate of the speed of light: 136,000 miles per second, which although 26 percent lower than the currently accepted speed, was nonetheless very close. It was to be another half-century after Huygens’ pendulum that clocks could measure seconds with any precision.
S ECONDS
Your average day of 1,440 minutes consists of 86,400 seconds. If the average thirty-day month, then, has 2,592,000 seconds and hence the average year
There is a further parallel, not with my sports clock, but between the hourglass and time. Beyond the hourglass’s direct representation of time’s flow is the correspondence between the shape of the hourglass and the division of time into past, present and future. The reservoirs of future and past, the upper and lower bulbs respectively, are connected by the waist of the present. Perhaps the present moment, our “now,” is more exactly like the waist of the hourglass than we know. “Now” is unmoving, and instead, time rushes through it, giving us the illusory sense that the present moment races from the past towards the future, or that the future flows through it towards the past. Maybe the present moment is more like the lens of a projector that the film of time is playing through.
The hourglass has a final deep parallel with time. If, at the end of time, time reverses and the universe runs backwards, as an astophysicist named Thomas Gold has proposed, then turning the hourglass upside down after the “future” has run out is a perfect allegory. Perhaps the process repeats endlessly, the universe inverting like an egg timerin a kitchen morning after morning, or like the demon that Nietzsche wrote about (who, like Thomas Gold, we will encounter later on in this book). Finally, there is the analogy between mortality and time running out. The Grim Reaper doesn’t brandish his hourglass idly.
Mechanical clocks had, and still have, an element of mortality to them. Their measured ticks seem to dole out our lives. I remember how, when my mother was in her final days, she would keep glancing at her bedside clock. It was her compass, an absolute within the delerium that slowly overtook her. It was also a solace of sorts. I think the last control she could exercise over the world was to keep track of her daily calendar of events, of impending visits by her home-care nurse and the lonely hours of the night. Clocks are not the enemy, of course. They only measure our mortality. (Though neither are they our friend.) But the connection between clocks and mortality is strong nonetheless. It sometimes seems as if time stalks us, like the ticking clock in the stomach of the crocodile in Peter Pan.
I doubt that associations of mortality were a factor when clocks were a brand-new technology, when the chiming of the hours became a theme song to the cultural awakening of Europe in the sixteenth century. Still, the measurement of minutes was centuries away. Although the church had already instituted St. Bede the Venerable’s division of the hour into sixty minutes and the minute into sixty seconds, at least on paper, it wasn’t until Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1665 that accurate minutes became a reality and Bede’s abstractions became practicable. Huygens, the son of the famous Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens, was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. His invention of the pendulum clock was more of a practical necessity than an end in itself; he wanted to measure the motion of the planetsand their moons as precisely as possible. Eleven years later Ole Römer used Huygens’ pendulum to calibrate the occlusion of the moons of Jupiter and came up with the first quantitative estimate of the speed of light: 136,000 miles per second, which although 26 percent lower than the currently accepted speed, was nonetheless very close. It was to be another half-century after Huygens’ pendulum that clocks could measure seconds with any precision.
S ECONDS
Your average day of 1,440 minutes consists of 86,400 seconds. If the average thirty-day month, then, has 2,592,000 seconds and hence the average year
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