Discover Magazine reports on a remarkable new timekeeping device known as the Clock Of The Long Now, which has been designed to keep accurate time for 10,000 years:
Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth’s axis.
The article goes into a lot more detail and also explains some of the astronomical and mechanical phenomena influencing the design.
