(YouTube link)
Stephen Hawking will return from the CERN collider today to unveil the new clock at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, England. The unusual clock was designed by inventor John Taylor.
For all its apparent eccentricity, the clock is based on solidly traditional clockwork - unusual in these days of digital electronic clocks. It has taken seven years' research and construction, incorporates six patented inventions, and is predicted to run for at least 250 years assuming the world lasts that long.
Engineer Stewart Huxley refuses to reveal the secret of its tricks, which include the pendulum occasionally apparently catching and stopping for a heartbeat, and then swinging faster to catch up.
Link -Thanks, Jayne Howley!
"Take now the clockworks... The clockworks, being genuine and not much to look at, don't generate the drama of an Earth-tilt or a flying saucer, nor do they seem to offer any immediate panacea for humanity's fifty-seven varieties of heartburn. But suppose that you're one of those persons who feels trapped, to some degree, trapped matrimonially, occupationally, educationally or geographically, or trapped in something larger than all those; trapped in a system, or what you might describe as an "increasingly deadening technocracy" or a "theater of paranoia and desperation" or something like that. Now, if you are one of those persons... wouldn't the very knowledge that there are clockworks ticking away behind the wallpaper of civilization, unbeknownst to leaders, organizers and managers (the President included), wouldn't that knowledge, suggesting as it does the possibility of unimaginable alternatives, wouldn't that knowledge be a bubble bath for your heart?"
~Tom Robbins, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" (1976)