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Les Ambassadeurs - Magazine No 5

In spring 2009 at Baselworld, attentive observers noted that the face of fine watchmaking was no longer uniformly circular. The vast majority of round dials was joined by a few amazing UFOs offering masterful variations on the theme of linear time read-off. From the incredible CC1 by Urwerk to Opus IX by Harry Winston and Eric Giroud, along with the splendid Meccanico dG by de Grisogono, Swiss watchmaking suddenly seemed eager to break free of its hands and circular dials in order to prove that sophisticated mechanical horology was not inextricably entwined with a cyclical perception of time.
All of which raises the fundamental question our own relationship with time.

Let's start by ignoring the issue of the nature of time. Neither scientists nor philosophers have ever been able to define it other than in reference to themselves or to a beginning and an end - the limits of which vary with each new discovery. The perception of time is a personal, cultural and historical matter. There are two major schools of thought in this area: that of time as a cyclical phenomenon, and that of linear time.
Any observation of nature spontaneously suggests a cyclical vision of time. The earth spins on its axis and around the sun with absolute regularity. Once this time has been subdivided into precise units, our entire short-term temporal world can be measured. The immutably regular cycle of seasons dictates the periods of activity and rest, of seedtime and harvest. The visible world can be summed up within this endlessly accurate and reassuring process of constant renewal.
Horology was born from this vision of the world and thus naturally adopted the circle as its fundamental element. The figure 12 that dominates all dials is at once and in turn the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega. This mechanical rhythm of the hours can be extrapolated to define all the various subdivisions, providing the cadence of the movements enables such measurements.
However, when it comes to defining a perpetual calendar, things are not quite so simple. Despite watchmakers' impressive ingenuity, no existing mechanism appears capable of offering a guarantee of precision extending beyond a few hundred years without any maintenance or adjustment. Is that a question of human incompetence? Definitely not! So let's get back to cyclical time. As soon as we need to move beyond measuring the time the Earth takes to move around the Sun, we are forced to resort to an arbitrary measurement.

While the latter varies according to our culture and our religion, there is nothing at all cyclical about it. We thereby enter the world of linear time. By way of example, this article is written in the year 2009 AD, which means the year 1430 of the Hegira, or Muslim calendar, and the year 5769 of the Jewish calendar. Given the high degree of probability that the events on which these calendars were founded are not reproduced at regular intervals, this means that measurement of our long-term time is in fact linear.
Perhaps you have also noticed that combining a cyclical hour with a linear date results in a necessarily linear combination. Does that mean we must definitively conclude that the flow of time is linear and not cyclical? This is a fundamental question that has fascinated the world's greatest thinkers, from the Greek stoics through to Nietzsche, as well as Pythagoras, Kant and Schopenhauer. And none of them have come up with any conclusive answer!
Religions have enabled humankind to look beyond the units of measurements provided by the sky above them, but have also fixed a beginning and in some cases an end that restricted their horizons. Galileo and Newton pointed out the limits of these theoretical constructions, yet without finding a more global cycle that would encompass previous ones. In 1927, Monsignor Georges Edouard Lemaître provided the world with a whole new paradigm thanks to the Big Bang, which pushed the Alpha of the universe back in time by a massive 14 billion years. Other researchers subsequently came up with an Omega in the form of the Big Crunch, forecast to occur in around 50 billion years' time. All of which provides material on which to build a new linear calendar, but still no means of defining a new cycle summing up the others and anchoring our vision of the world in a lasting and reassuring reality.

Just as an ant is incapable of grasping the round nature of the earth, we will probably never know whether the cycles of our solar system are part of the cycles of our universe as a whole, and whether the cycles of our universe are themselves incorporated within other realities that elude us and always will.
Whatever our level of knowledge, our time will always be subject to a superior linear factor that we must build - a daunting enterprise on the scale of our capacities for thought, but one that is of little importance in our daily lives.
So the regular cycle of the hands on the dials of our mechanical watches will continue to reassure us for many years to come, enabling us to enjoy the illusion that life is an endless circle in which absolutely anything can happen at any moment. And we will therefore be relieved to note that the linear displays provided by contemporary horology are all founded, without exception, on a mechanical base that is quite naturally… cyclical.