Stephen Hawking Unveils "Time Eater" Clock 198
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."
It works, I just watched some of the video (Score:5, Funny)
Re:who is it (Score:5, Funny)
He's Stephen Hawking's non-union equivalent.
I'm just disappointed... (Score:4, Funny)
... that the inventor isn't named "Reg"
"Time Eater" (Score:2, Funny)
Re:who is it (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry if you want to know about time eaters (Score:5, Funny)
you actually can get the minutes back by reversing time [skybooksusa.com].
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 [superstringtheory.com] 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 [newscientist.com] 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.
Re:Technology? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:LEDs (Score:4, Funny)
No. Best would be hundreds of oil lamps. Gas lamps might be acceptable as long as they used coal gas. Limelight might be acceptable.
Re:It works, I just watched some of the video (Score:3, Funny)
How much did it cost to post the reply? Meh, I'm going to bed.
Re:Technology? (Score:1, Funny)
I have a phone that does this anytime I get an e-mail. I get about 15 e-mails in the same hours that I sleep. I have taken to just turning the phone over and I can't see the flash any longer.
Damn it, stop telling people to do this! We here at the Gaffers' Tape Producers' Association do not support this solution!
Re:Because /. Nerds Worship Hawking as God (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Usual caveats seem to apply (Score:4, Funny)
Interesting ideas, but just to let you know there will be electro-magnetic fields a human being will pass through with such a device that would stop the heart and fry the brain unless it was properly shielded. When anything goes through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, you have to properly shield it. Once you uncover the grand unified theory and prove that, you will discover how to shield against electro-magnetic fields to prevent damage. Another way is to convert the matter into energy, pass it through such a device, and then convert the energy back into matter after passing through, much like those Star Trek transporter technology if you don't mind your molecules being taken apart and put back together.
Black holes are not really black, there is a nano aspect to them in the lower dimensions that does not resemble a singularity as is commonly thought, and in some cases they are nicknamed as time eaters because they eat time and space as well as matter and energy, but regurgitate it back up in a different dimension as the Super Nova or high gravity that caused it to form punched a hole in our universe to a different universe or dimension, and the black hole appears hungry and eats all matter, energy, time, and space, to the observer, and the other end is somewhere else where everything it ate comes out eventually.
Paranoia is a survival trait, but how does a person from the future know they can trust someone in the past to not change things so their future won't exist anymore? Trust is a two-way street.
Still Chronodymanics and Chrononaughts haven't been developed or thought up yet, as this century is still stifled by atheistic and secular scientists who lack the imagination and do not even believe that such science or technology is possible and don't believe in the nano dimensions or other universes or dimensions, so they force their "version" of the Truth(TM) on us that nothing exists outside of our universe and that there are only three dimensions and completely ignore space and time as dimensions, ignore Spinosa and Einstein's theories on God and all the work on it that Hawking based on Einstein and Spinosa's work in "A Brief History of Time which explains the scientific theories that came from Christianity and religion and what God really is and the universe. That makes this modern science with a very myoptic "caveman" view of reality. But we are learning new information every year.
Ironically 4000 to 6000 years ago some of the beings who helped our civilizations gave knowledge of the universe and it was to be a user's manual for the "program" our machine (universe) runs but it got easily confused for religion when it was actually science and all of the parts the people 4000+ years ago couldn't understand rejected it and rewrote it so it made more sense to their "cavemen" mentality, but the philisophies and theories came to form ancient science and moved away from "magic" as alchemy evolved into chemistry, astrology evolved into astronomy, theology evolved into physics, etc and we got modern science thanks to the Aztecs, Babylonians, Jewish people, early Christians (Monks in a Monastery came up with scientific theories before Newton did).
God is a time traveler, he traveled back to the past to become his own son, and then traveled back to the beginning of time and became his father, and then traveled again and became the holy spirit, and has tried to change history for the good of humanity. In the original time line, Hitler won WWII, but God changed that, yet in doing so other bad things had happened, but not as bad as Nazi Germany controlling the entire world. This universe is an accident, really, The Devil worked for God and thought he could do a better job but started a war in Heaven that created this universe, and God has been cleaning things up every since. Since The Devil stole some of God's ideas, but flawed them, Jesus had to be born to try and fix things and set us back on the right path. We are all part of a program and don't know it.
Not everyone will believe me, most will
the problem is the name (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:the name (Score:4, Funny)
"Time Eater" is a very misleading name. It should really be called a CLOCK GOBBLER.
At 120 Watts, it should be called the "Energy Gobbler" instead.
Apparently the sound it makes when the programmable alarm goes off is:
"Whooooooosh!"