Life, The Universe And Everything With Professor Brian Cox

Augustman met Professor Brian Cox at Watches and Wonders Geneva as he presented the new IWC Schaffhausen Portugieser Eternal Calendar. Existentialist questions around time and existence followed in our exclusive interview.

- SUFFIAN HAKIM

IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN presented a deeply fascinating booth at this year’s Watches and Wonders Geneva. They built a large replica of the moon, under which a water feature provided the platform to showcase their novelties for the year.

Among them was the exquisite IWC Schaffhausen Portugieser Eternal Calendar, its alabaster-like dial more pronounced under the ‘glow’ of the moon. The Portugieser Eternal Calendar builds on the existing perpetual calendar design, adding a special 400-year gear that rotates once every four centuries and has three indentations that allows the calendar to skip three leap years within that time. Ceteris paribus, it will calculate the leap year correctly until, at least, the year 3999, as it has not yet been officially decided whether the year 4000 would be a leap year or not.

Meanwhile, a new reduction gear has been added between the main movement and the moon phase disc for a more accurate moon phase complication (to reflect that a full moon cycle is not exactly 30 days but 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2.88 seconds). Three intemediate wheels were also added to the gear train to accommodate this change, resulting in a display that will remain accurate for at least 45 million years.

When making sense of such timescales, it is therefore fitting that IWC Schaffhausen turned to the brilliant Professor Brian Cox, physicist and professor of particle physics at the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Manchester and author of The Quantum Universe, to provide some context when he visited the Maison at Watches and Wonders Geneva.