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Able Quote by Dava Sobel

“And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able.” quote by Dava Sobel — Download Open image

“And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able.”

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Able Heartbeat Ifs Tempo Tides Time Timepieces

More by Dava Sobel

“[John] Harrison [could not] express himself clearly in writing… No matter how brilliantly ideas formed in his mind, or crystallized in his clockworks, his…

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“With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth—temporal—dimension to link points on…

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Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set, with authority, by the celestial spheres. Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to…

“He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.”

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“Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God's magnificent clockwork. Dava Sobel”

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“the beaches. In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel’s ignorance of her longitude led swiftly to her destruction. Launched on a mix of bravery and greed, the sea captains of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries relied on “dead reckoning” to gauge their distance east or west of home port. The captain would throw a log overboard and observe how…

“Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds…

“And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly that…

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“As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited…

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“There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand—the suppression of science by religion, the defense of individualism…

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“To have done work which is widely recognized, to have gained the sincere esteem of many and the real love of even a few,…

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“In the wake of the Longitude Act, the concept of “discovering the longitude” became a synonym for attempting the impossible.”

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