Today I have spent considerable time at Greenwich, five hours and thirty minutes to be precise, for precision is everything here when it comes to keeping time. It is a pleasant suburb of London with sweeping greens, gentle hillocks and easy walking paths. This is a personal estimation that is likely to be shared by many others. I found many enjoying this part of town just as I had done so myself. I obtained a different view of Greenwich from within the darkness of a Camera Obscura that stood on this hill. Of particular interest is the Old Royal Observatory where lies a line demarcating the zero meridian. Here tourists stand astride, proud of the fact that they can stand with one foot in the east and one foot in the west at the same time. They had perhaps not realised that one can do this anywhere on this earth; and a meridian is nothing more than a logical line drawn from pole to pole. Yes, geographically there’s nothing special but historically the zero meridian is special only by way of definition. At Greenwich, the history of world-clock was born. Today’s globalisation had found its orientation in Time.
I am impressed yet again, following my visit to the British Museum in London and the Science Museum in Oxford, of the unswerving dedication and passionate pursuit of the human mind and its enquiry into the secrets of the universe. Every piece of instrument that I found here is a marvellous invention – the earliest compasses of the Chinese, the qiblas of the Arab world, the astrolabes and quadrants of astronomers the world over, the armillary spheres, the complex orreries with their interlocked circles, the scaphe dials, the telescopes, the pendulum clock… the list goes on.
From this list, one stands out to embody the spirit of human enquiry and endeavour: the H3 clock made by John Harrison over a period of 19 years! Its immediate successor, the H4, completed in 1759, was the first precision mechanical clock that was used at sea and won the coveted Longitude Prize. H4 is compact and portable. Its predecessors, although unwieldy by today’s standards, are as much works of art as feats of engineering.
Thus it came to be that England continued its dominance of the seas and set the standard for precision time-keeping. Thus it came to be that Greenwich made a name for itself, by being strategically located on a hill from where the master clock could be visually derived by boats out on the Thames. Thus it came to be that the precision clock, sometimes called the chronometer, replaced sophisticated and complicated methods based on motions of the moon and the sun. Today, of course, we have gone further with the advent of atomic clocks. Does this say something to us? Does it not mean that the ultimate secrets of this universe are not in the great visible objects of space but lie hidden in the minute atoms of our own world, their nuclei and their constituent components? Does it not imply that Truth too can only be discovered by a persistent search from within and not from without?
These advances may have undermined the close association between time-keeping and astronomy but they have not divorced the two. We continue to scour the night skies with our telescopes and even send unmanned space probes to the outer limits of the Solar System. Only now are we slowly beginning to understand and hypothesize the history of the universe. At the heart of any observatory is the realization that we are but a small part of this universe, which motivates a quest for a companion world like our own.
