6 Comments

I had never heard of water clocks; very ingenious. One of my favorite books was Longitude about John Harrison and I’m definitely looking forward to your post about him!

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I just started reading Longitude! It’s a pretty short and entertaining read (so far).

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Bravo. Really enjoyed this. Sharing two resources as reference:

Dava Sobel, Longitude

Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now, which has a chapter on time

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Wow thank you for those references. It’s opportune too! I’m so deep in “time research” :)

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I find the quest for longitude (i.e., time) fascinating. At some point, I will get into collecting sextants, chronometers, etc. (narrator's voice: but not today.)

One more suggested and very fun resource: Time & Navigation - the Untold Story of Getting from Here to There

This gets into celestial navigation, which ultimately moves to terrestrial (LORAN) and then back again to space-based systems (GPS, Glonass, Beidou etc) again.

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Thanks! Yeah it’s a fascinating topic for me, time is a complex concept, intangible, relative and hard to measure. Everything about it is hard.

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