I would have thought an answer like “sewing needle” and “sewing machine” would have been a lot simpler. Unless you consider the wielding of the needle as moving.
I think it is unfortunate that no sundial was available with luminous numbers that would glow in the dark so that one could tell time at night. An hourglass with sand treated with radium so that it would glow in the dark would also have been useful for telling time at night.
Actually, Copernicus wasn’t wrong, but neither was Ptolemy. According to Stephen Hawking in a recent Scientific American:
“Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. As in the cae of our view versus that of the goldfish, one can use either picture as a model of the universe, becauese we can explain our observations of the heavans by assuming either Earth or the sun to be at rest. Despite its role in philosophical deates over the nature of our universe, the real advantage of the Copernican system is that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.”
I own a sewing machine. It has fewer than 1,000 moving parts. Good thinking, though.
That’s the real problem with this puzzler (which I failed to solve): hourglasses DO NOT TELL TIME. They are timers. Set a piece of rope on fire and you can achieve the same result.
Only but, you could mark a really big hour glass with twelve hour marks, stick around for the critical upendings, and have a thing that tells time. The burning rope you talk about could even be made to wake you up when it was short enough for replacement.
Okay, two things…
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The “one moving part” of a sundial is the shadow.
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This is another repeat. I remember hearing it on the show before because I just about to submit it myself at that time but I thought it might need more pre-obfuscation to be suitable (which clearly was not the case).
(Bonus third thing: a burning rope can also be used to tell time, but there are few of those in use today for that purpose, unlike the sundial and hourglass. A variant of the burning rope would be a candle, but like the rope you can’t keep re-using it.)
The burning rope that wakes you up is called a fuse.
“Only but, you could mark a really big hour glass with twelve hour marks, stick around for the critical upendings, and have a thing that tells time.”
Only but, how would this hourglass tell me when it’s noon? An hourglass DOESN’T TELL TIME, it measures elapsed time. You might as well say a stopwatch tells time. If you’re comfortable with a little less precision, a piece of rotting meat or a melting ice cube will do the same thing.
Good point. We could really go off the chain and suggest that the continent is moving upon the surface of the Earth, the Earth is moving about the solar system, the solar system is moving through the galaxy, the galaxy is moving through the universe, the universe may be one of many universes…
Or maybe it’s just a dumb puzzler.
“…how would this hourglass tell me when it’s noon?”
I guess the same way your clock tells you when it’s noon: You have to synchronize it to some other time source at its first use – an estimate (from shadows) of the time the sun is at the meridian, for instance, if you don’t want to rely on another clock.
A clock really measures elapsed time, after all. The hands and clock face translate elapsed time into time-telling in the same way that marks on the 12-hour glass would.
I’ll be sure to remember about rotting meat.
That’s a good point. I remember learning that in high school physics, but when you mention it to people they tend to look at you like a leprositic panhandler in need of a bath. Not to mention they don’t believe it.
If you want me accept the assertion that clocks don’t tell time, very well then, I accept it.
Don’t let your meat rot!
- Turn a sundial upside down. How many moving parts now?
It looks like this was kind of touched on in other posts, but the answer stated on the show seems incorrect, at least by a technicality, regardless of moving/non-moving parts.
Only the hourglass performs the stated answer which is to MEASURE THE PASSAGE OF TIME (absolute). A sundial, on the other hand, INDICATES THE TIME OF DAY (relative) via the sun’s position in the sky. The two technologies are complementary to one another for the the general MEASUREMENT OF TIME, which, when stated like that, is a good answer. In other words, you can’t use an hourglass by itself to know when noon is, and you can’t use a sundial by itself to reliably measure the length of a day.
Well stated. Can I interest you in a piece of rotting meat?
Speaking of relative motion, is anyone familiar with the scientist’s (contemporary of Einstein) attempt to prove Einstein wrong. He floated a slab of concrete on a pool of mercury thinking that due to the Earth’s motion it would gravitate to one side of the pool. After his first failure he had all traffic in the city (Pennsylvania I believe) stopped at the appropriate time and set the slab back on the mercury. Same effect. When Einstein had the opportunity he asked the fellow “why do you keep attempting to prove me wrong?”. His answer if memory serves was “It’s fun.” Off topic but I thought it interesting.
You have successfully obfuscated the Michelson-Morley experiment, and by obfuscated I mean made it sound like a story told by a lunatic, but in a good way. This was all over and done with before Einstein published his first paper.
jmmahony, I think you got the CarTalk site by mistake.There must be an astrology web site with similiar letters. Sorry, good luck finding it.
Here’s the real problem, guys. We are tossing nits back and forth while “the real issue here is the monkey!” The 25 or so percent of the world who really do believe that the Earth stands immovable, because some literal interpretation of some scriptural work by some misguided holy book writer said so, and these folk believe that literal (as translated x+1 times) interpretation of said holy work. You are reinforcing the same religious claptrap that got Bruno killed, and Galileo under house arrest. You do a grave disservice to all of us who are trying to educate elementary-college students about how the universe works. If we can’t get past the motions of the Earth relative to it’s parent star, what hope do we have? Please make it right, Tom&Ray. you guys are usually so spot on with your ‘Occam’s Razor-like’ techniques once you quit goofing around.
Theory of relativity. The cops are going faster than you are.