IWC Schaffhausen presented a deeply fascinating booth at this year’s Watches and Wonders Geneva. They built a large replica of the moon, under which a water feature provides the platform to showcase their novelties for the year.
Among them was the exquisite IWC Schaffhausen Portugieser Eternal Calendar, its alabaster-like dial more pronounced under the ‘glow’ of the moon. The Portugieser Eternal Calendar builds on the existing perpetual calendar design, adding a special 400-year gear that rotates once every four centuries, and that has three indentations that allows the calenda to skip three leap years within that time. Ceteris paribus, it will calculate the leap year correctly until at least the year 3999, as it has not yet been officially decided whether the year 4000 will be a leap year or not.
Meanwhile, a new reduction gear has been added between the main movement and the moon phase disc for a more accurate moon phase complication (to reflect that a full moon cycle is not exactly 30 days but 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2.88 seconds). Three intemediate wheels were also added to the gear train to accomodate this change, resulting in a display that will remain accurate for at least 45 million years.
When making sense of such timescales, it is therefore fitting that IWC Schaffhausen turned to the brilliant Professor Brian Cox, physicist and professor of particle physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester, and the author of The Quantum Universe, to provide some context as he visited the Maison at Watches and Wonders Geneva.
At the fair, Professor Brian Cox was greeted by Chris Grainger-Herr, CEO of IWC Schaffhausen, Franziska Gsell, CMO of IWC Schaffhausen and Christian Knoop, CDO of IWC Schaffhausen. Following Brian’s tour of the booth, he took the stage with Chris Grainger-Herr and Christian Knoop to co-host IWC’s keynote.
And then, he sat with AUGUSTMAN at the IWC booth.
AM: Dr. Cox, how did time begin and how will it end?
I could say that time began 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. However, we don’t really know that. We have theories now that suggest space and time were around before the Big Bang. So when we start talking about the origins of the universe, I would say we’re not really going to know the answer to that question until we know what time is, and we really don’t know what time is at the deepest and the most fundamental level.
Einstein famously said that time is a thing you measure on a watch. But he was kind of joking when he said that. In his theory of relativity, time is the measure of the distance we’re travelling over spacetime. Time runs at different speeds for different people in different places, whether you are accelerating relative to somebody else or whether you take a different route between things that happen. Once you start to dig deeper, we find that we don’t really know what time is.
Can you illustrate with an example what space-time is?
The picture I developed of space-time over the years and am teaching to students is that of a map. Think about space-time as a collection of all events – all the things that happen in space and time in our universe. And now imagine putting points on your map. There is a line you follow from one event to another, a route you take over the map. And that is called your world line. As we wander across the map, our watches measure the length of our world line.
If time can be understood as a distance, how far do we travel in a lifetime?
In Einstein’s theory, how far we travel over space-time is our age. It’s a straightforward answer. If you live for 77 years, six days, and 3 seconds, that is how far you have travelled, which is a beautiful thing. Quite literally, your age is the distance you travel over spacetime.
What’s your take on the Grand Unifying Theory in Physics?
My interest is in black holes, and in studying black holes, we are led to a theory that suggests that space and time are not fundamental. They emerge from something deeper – the technical term for it is emergent spacetime. For me, that’s the most interesting leap forward in theoretical physics in a long time.
Emergent spacetime? Can you simplify that for us?
An analogy would be human consciousness. You could think about human beings as collections of atoms that obey the laws of nature. And out of that emerges something new, something different. This idea that we can look at a watch and find it beautiful – what is that? Whatever it is, it emerges from something that does not have “beauty” in it. In the same way, we are beginning to believe that there is a deeper picture, which could be string theory or some quantum theory of objects interacting. And, somehow, a sense of space and time emerges out of that.
What do you think of the Portugieser Eternal Calendar?
These watches – in particular the Portugieser Eternal Calendar – are astonishing machines. The technical achievements behind it is remarkable. But the most valuable thing is that they’re following the motion of the Earth around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth and the way these things are rotating and orbiting and interacting with each other and their relative positions to each other.
Secondly, I admire the ambition. Think about what the Eternal Calendar is doing. It’s calculating and telling us that every 400 years, have a leap year. It’s to keep our days, our years, our seasons synchronized with the movement of the heavens. And it’s mechanical. Obviously, we can calculate this with a computer programme, but the fact that this is done mechanically and physically is astounding. I am amazed by the ambition to create this thing that’s accurate to 45 million years. I can’t think of any other field of human endeavour done with the next 45 million years in mind.
There is always a deep mystery when you look at your watch – a mystery that is intertwined with space and time and the structure of the universe itself.
For all intents and purposes, 45 million years is an eternity. What will the universe look like then?
In our current baseline model of the universe, we understand that the universe is not only expanding, but it is expanding at an accelerating rate. If the universe continues to do that, we will reach a point when everything is so far apart from everything else, and the temperature of everything is the same. Technically, we would say that entropy always increases as the universe goes from a highly ordered state to something more messy. However, one of the things that we know about a clock is that it is a thermodynamic device. To build a clock, you need a temperature difference. In the far future, we will reach a point when no more temperature differences exist in our universe. I suppose that, then, time will have gone.
When we get to the point where nothing happens in our universe – when there are no more temperature differences, and you can’t even build a clock. That, to me, is eternity. It goes on forever, and time will have ceased to have meaning. To give you a rough number: we currently believe that the supermassive black hole in the centre of our galaxy will evaporate in something like 10 to the power of 100 years. That’s one with 100 zeros. So, we are talking about an unbelievable amount of time before that probably will happen.
Is eternity a scientific fact or a philosophical concept?
Some physicists argue you can get into problems if you think about an eternal universe that will continue to expand forever. So, they believe that the universe may not continue to do that. The problem is that we do not know what is driving this accelerating expansion. We have a name for it. We call it dark energy. But we do not understand what it is. And without knowing what it is, we do not know whether it is eternal. It could be that this thing has a lifetime and, at one point, will stop doing what it is doing. It might change into something else, something that collapses the universe again. Then, we would not have an eternally accelerating universe but a bouncing universe that returns to a big crunch.
Dr. Cox, what is the answer to life, the universe and everything?
I think the answer is that we are so unbelievably fortunate to exist at all, even for these brief moments of time – a century or less – I think the answer is to be astonished and delighted that we exist.
We’re just collections of atoms – the same building blocks that make mountains or stars or galaxies, but yet in this particular collection of atoms that we call me or you or us, we can explore the universe, think about the universe, ask questions about the universe, have an emotional response to the vastness and scale of it all.
So the answer, to me, is to be astonished that you exist, and to be grateful to the universe – whatever that might mean – that you exist, and enjoy it.
