Monsters are Fun

[platypus_herder]

Broadly speaking, I find that “steampunk” can refer to two different cultural streams. One, with roots in the work of Jules Vernes, extrapolates and amplifies industrial-era technology, exploring what might have happened if clever nineteenth-century inventor-engineers had had access to better metallurgy, higher-density power sources and precision

Comments

[sprrwhwk]

I've always been disappointed that the steampunk craze hasn't lead to more of a revival of interest in eg. watchmaking -- I'm obviously coming from that first steampunk impulse you talk about -- so it was a pleasure to run into a gentleman at the Waltham steampunk festival a few weeks ago who was building a working steam-powered motorcycle, and a few other similar (im)practical things.

Also, I was pleased to see that the first Clock (of the Long Now) is being built in Texas.

[platypus_herder]

Someday, that clock is going to be the perfect setting for an Indiana Jones movie.

[nakor]

His data revealed the clock was so sensitive it was detecting the slight changes in gravity due to tidal distortions in the solid Earth caused by the passage of the Sun and Moon overhead.

With barely post-Einstein technology. If Einstein hadn't had a convenient eclipse to prove GR in 1921, Shortt could have shipped him a clock to do so less than a year later. Put that in the Great Man theory of science and smoke it.

[platypus_herder]

Hmmm. I want to agree with you, but I'm confident that the wording you cite is misleading. As I remember it, the Shortt clock was the first clock good enough to detect fluctuations in the Earth's rate of rotation due to Newtonian mechanical effects like the tidal distortions of the mass distribution. Hence the moniker “the first clock better than Nature itself”, since the Earth's rotation had been the best clock available until then. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the total GR gravitational time dilation is slightly below the second-per-decade sensitivity of the Shortt clock, and the tidal fluctuations in that time dilation would be six orders of magnitude further down. Even atomic clocks have only quite recently gotten that good; most GR tests have been done using huge altitude separations to get a bigger signal. I'd rather not edit the wikipedia entry without seeing the Boucheron paper and knowing exactly what it claims, but I'll bet it doesn't claim sensitivity to GR effects