From Schaffhausen to Eternity

IWC Schaffhausen unveils its tribute to eternity - the IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar - which features celestial calculations that are accurate to a T.

- Asaph Low

Time has been one of the greatest mysteries and paradoxes to humankind. One would think that many millennia later — with the advancement of technology — we would have cracked the code by now, but instead, we have fallen deeper into a bottomless rabbit hole of theories and ideas. At the dawn of civilisation, the sun’s rising and setting was the earliest precursor of what time was before observations of the moon and other celestial bodies gave a semblance of time as a construct. Watches (and clocks) played a role after their inventions, allowing people to keep track of time; yet it still does not answer the question — what is time? Renowned physicist Brian Cox — invited to speak at the IWC Schaffhausen Keynote at Watches & Wonders Geneva 2024 — answered succinctly in three simple words, “We don’t know.”

“Albert Einstein’s relativity model is our best theory of gravity, space and time. What is a watch measuring in his theory?” Cox posed the question to the audience. “Distance. Imagine a map of space and time with things that happened and will happen to you as memories and points on that map. The distance between those points — the distance between now and tomorrow — is what a watch is measuring. In other words, a watch measures the distance you travel over the spacetime map in Einstein’s model, but it still doesn’t answer what time is.”