AtDDtA1: Railroad Watch

[Monte Davis]

David Casseres:
 
It's that synchronicity/chronograph theme that P. introduced in M&D.  It was
crucial to ocean navigation and surveying in the 18th century, and again to
railroad timetables in the 19th.  In both cases, the projection of European
Lines onto the rest of the world. 
 
But there would be limits, and AtD is carrying us right up against them.
 
Peter Galison's wonderful 2003  _Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps_ begins
with the town clock in Bern, where patent clerk Einstein sees a steady
stream of devices intended to synchronize remote timekeeping -- something we
hadn't needed before railroad/telegraph time, or at least not with such
precision. (Cf. also the central role of railroad timetables in the
introduction of time zones.) 
As Galison makes clear, Einstein didn't just pluck out of the air the use of
trains and clocks in his _gedanken_ experiments for special relativity. That
was precisely the domain in which his culture and its technology *cared*
most about achieving synchronicity.
 
But pushed hard enough, it breaks down. When you stop *assuming* that Bern
and Brussels share a common "now", independent of motion within it, as the
Cartesian/Newtonian map of space and time does... 
 
And demand exactly what procedure with real speed-of-light signals could
establish it (as one has to do in, say, evaluating a patent application)...
the map goes all skew-whiff on you.
 
But perhaps one could finesse the speed-of-light limit, play games with time
and sequence, if one's trains went through Switzerland in some kind of
special tunnel.. Maybe we could call it... Idunno...  a "worm hole"..?
 
As B4,
 
Uncle Tatzel
 
 
 


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