I wasn’t sure exactly what to categorize this post as but decided on calling it “modern art” as in art made in a recent time. The funny thing is it actually involves “time,” or at least a fantastic way of displaying it.
Inventor Dr. John Taylor woke up one morning and realized his days were numbered. At 70 he has lived a lifetime of achievement but has so much more to offer. So much, as his epiphany taught him, which will never occur thanks to time eating away his life minute by minute. Precious time is gone and irretrievable; he is mortal like everyone else. This gave him the idea for clock which he calls Corpus Clock and Chronophage.
The chronphage, or “time eater,” sits on top with ghastly arms and legs marching time on the outer wheel. With each second the horrible mouth with needle-sharp teeth opens ever more until the end of the minute when it comes crashing down, devouring that minute forever. Every hour, a chain sounds the hour and a lid slams down on a coffin. There are no hands to tell the time, but rather lights around the face. Each second, a light races around to reach its next reading.
This work of art doesn’t cease to amaze. The time is actually a little off, except for about once every five minutes. Time, the same way it appears in life, fluctuates erratically in speed at random. The pendulum at some points will stop, the lights will sometimes go back a few spots, then speed up. As Einstein says of relativity: “an hour with a pretty girl seems like a minute, a minute on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
The clock was unveiled at Corpus Cristi College in Cambridge by renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, author of “A Brief History of Time.” Hawking once theorized that if the universe stops expanding and begins retracting, then time can be reversed and events will work in rewind.
The clock is meant to remind observers of their own mortality.
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