About Time (Part 2) ~ Roger Wood

Roger Wood concludes his discussion on time. Time is something that we are all acutely aware of but does it exist as an independent feature in nature or is it just the product of our minds? What characteristics of time do we use in our everyday lives? How do we measure time? Is it the same for all observers? Will we ever be able to travel in time? Did time begin with the Big Bang? What is the arrow of time?

Charles Tyson Yerkes: Benefactor or Buccaneer? ~ David Pulley

Charles Yerkes funded the Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago in the late nineteenth century.  But were his motives truly philanthropic?  And what became of the great 40” refractor.

The Synchronome~ Simon Allen

The Synchronome free pendulum clock was a complex precision electromechanical pendulum clock invented in 1921 by British railway engineer William Hamilton Shortt.  They were the most accurate pendulum clocks ever commercially produced, and became the highest standard for timekeeping between the 1920s and the 1940s. They were used worldwide in astronomical observatories, naval observatories, in scientific research, and was the first clock to be a more accurate timekeeper than the Earth itself; Shortt clocks achieved accuracy of around a second per year.