Martin Freeman - Heist 2001 - Dave Allen - Ancient Discoveries TV - William Shakespeare - Jay Griffiths - George Orwell - Marcus du Sautoy TV - Michio Kaku - Lawrence Krauss - Richard Gott - Horizon TV - Richard Dawkins - Big Ben: Saving the World’s Most Famous Clock TV -
I like things that are simple, such as an alarm clock. Martin Freeman
I never liked the Swiss. They make them little clocks. These two cocksuckers come out of them. These little hammers. Hit each other on the head. What kind of sick mentality is that? Heist 2001 starring Gene Hackman & Danny De Vito & Delroy Lindo & Rebecca Pidgeon & Ricky Jay & Sam Rockwell et al, director David Mamet, Pinky
We spend our lives on the run. We get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, go to work by the clock, get up again, go to work – and then we retire. And what do they fucking give us? A clock. Dave Allen
Clocks are the lynchpin of human civilisation. Ancient Discoveries: Ancient New York, History 2008
The clock upbraids me with the waste of time. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night III I 129, Olivia
The clock, for all its precision in measurement, is a blunt instrument for the psyche and for society. Schedules can replace sensitivity to the mood of a moment, clock time can ride roughshod over the emotions of individuals. Jay Griffiths
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly though the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quick enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. George Orwell, 1984 p1 1949
A new generation of clock: the atomic clock. Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Precision: The Measure of All Things I: Time and Distance, BBC 2013
Time is relative. The faster you move, the slower Time beats. A clock at the top of a building actually runs a little bit faster than a clock at the bottom of a building. Professor Michio Kaku
It’s really true that clocks do slow down relative to an observer watching someone travel near the speed of light. Professor Lawrence Krauss
Einstein’s work completely transformed our view of Time. He showed that Time was bendable. All clocks did not tick at the same rate. Professor Richard Gott, Princetown University
In this paper Einstein declared that the slower you move the faster time passes. An experiment in 1991 proved him right. Four atomic clocks were flown around the world ... Time on the plane had warped by just what Einstein had predicted. Horizon: The Time Lords, BBC 1996
We need natural clocks that can time hundreds of millions, even billions, of years. And, praise be, nature has provided us with just the wide range of clocks that we need. What’s more, their ranges of sensitivity overlap with each other, so we can use them as checks on each other. Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth p88
The predictability of the rate of decay is the key to all radiometric clocks ... Every unstable or radioactive isotope decays at its own characteristic rate which is precisely known. ibid. p94
The favoured measure of decay rate is the ‘half-life’. The half-life of a radioactive isotope is the time taken for half of its atoms to decay. ibid. p9
Big Ben: the heartbeat of the nation, a symbol of British democracy. Its four great clock-faces have watched over six monarchs, welcomed in twenty-nine prime ministers and survived two world wars, and throughout it all it’s celebrated nearly 160 new years. Big Ben is one of the most photographed buildings in the world. Yet what the cameras don’t see is that it’s falling into disrepair. Now tens of millions of pounds will be spent to bring the clocktower back to its former glory. Big Ben: Saving the World’s Most Famous Clock, Channel 4 2017
The tower has eleven floors that few get to see … even a Victorian prison once used to lock up unruly MPs. ibid.
It looks like Big Ben is tilting … ‘about 260 millimetres out.’ ibid.
Big Ben was cast in 1858 at the Whitechapel Foundry in London. ibid.
The crack is almost as old as the bell. ibid.
‘I have never worked so hard in my life for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all the designs for finishing his bell tower and it is beautiful.’ ibid. Augustus Pugin