Galactic BREITLING
I have never been much of a watch wearer but I did save up to buy myself a nice watch once.
I spent so many years practising sports when I was a child that I rarely used a watch. I would end the training session when I was tired and not because there was a clock somewhere telling me the time.
Later in life, when I was a student I was always saving up to buy myself a Breitling watch. When the moment came that I had enough money saved up to buy a nice watch I never did because I wasn't used to wearing a watch and realised I didn't need one. I could quite accurately tell the time without a watch so I thought it was pointless to spend so much money in a watch.
Who wears a watch nowadays? Is it to tell the time or is it a fashion accessory?
Most of us have a mobile phone and one checks the time on there if required.
I always associated wearing a watch with poor time management but learnt that for some people a watch symbolises the ticking of the human heart and thus an indication of the emotional side of their life.
http://www.artomatique.net/horological-fine-art.html
I once worked alongside an Horologist who was making timepieces by hand and who was obsessed with time. He was a certified Master Watchmaker and learnt by his comments and frustration how difficult it was to make an instrument that would perform a repetitive action without fault.
I never told him but the more he was perfecting his instruments, the more he was emphasising the fact that we didn't need a watch specially if we couldn't really rely on to telling the correct "manmade" time.
Needless to say, this was in the south of Germany, where most services run "on time" all the time. Even the New Year's celebrations started 1 min before the other countries. That's when I reflected aloud in the streets while watching the fireworks : "that's why they are always on time, because they have the wrong time! They are too early, LOL."
This article explains pretty much everything you want to know about horology:
Measurement of the time dimension. In practice, horology is the search for a steady or repetitive action, and the design of an instrument to perform that action and to indicate (read out) a measure of the action. Until early in the twentieth century, horology dealt with mechanical instruments, with effort distributed between improving accuracy and decreasing size of timepieces. Increasingly, however, electronic instruments provided means for meeting these objectives.
An advance in accurate measurement of time came by replacement of dynamic mechanical oscillators with quantum energy transitions. Two standards in common use are the caesium atomic beam clock and the rubidium gas cell. More recently, trapped ion clocks, which use quantum transitions in elements such as mercury, have been developed. A small cloud of ions is trapped in a quadrupole electric field. The ions' thermal motions are then reduced by a technique called laser cooling. The quantum transitions in these clouds can then be measured with high precision.
Radio astronomers require precise time for two areas of experimentation: very long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) and pulsars. Both areas have the capability of providing precise time information. Very long-baseline interferometry involves multiplying samples of an incident electric field that are recorded independently at telescopes situated around the globe while being trained on the same object in the sky. Solar time, or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), is offset from International Atomic Time (TAI) to allow for the variable rotation of the Earth. The most precise measurement of Earth rotation comes fromVLBI measurements. Pulsars are highly magnetized and rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit intense beams of radio emission. Astronomers keep track of the rotations of these stars by referencing pulse arrival times to TAI, but not even the TAI time scale is sufficiently accurate because of the relativistic effects, gravitational redshift, any time dilation that result from the motion of the Earth. A new time scale, Terrestrial Time (TT), is derived from TAI without the relativistic effects. Timing measurements of the fastest pulsars, which rotate more than 600 times per second, are now as precise as the best Earth clocks over durations of a year or more. Time, which in prehistory was reckoned solely by astronomical events, has again become the province of astronomical observations.
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