Einstein and Twain?

"As I introduce the students to relativity in my physics classes, I like to begin by having them read Mark Twain's essay "My Watch" and discuss what our lives would be like if, for better or for worse, time actually could be adjusted in the manner Twain describes. I also read a selected chapter each day from Alan Lightman's book Einstein's Dreams3 to stimulate the students' thinking about the extent to which we are a time-dependent race, and that challenges to our Newtonian concept of time are not always initially welcome. These fictional writings allow the students license to think outside the Newtonian box I have put them in up to that point in my introductory physics course, and perhaps question what other challenges to our paradigms might lie out there in the great ocean of truth yet to be discovered."--Hugh Henderson.

Mark Twain, Relativity...and an essay by senior high school physics teacher Hugh Henderson. First is an essay by Mark Twain and then the Hugh Henderson essay.

"MY WATCH

An Instructive Little Tale"

by

Mark Twain

1903

MY beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining, and without break- ing any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized messenger and forerunner of calamity. But by and by I cheered up, set the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart. Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler's to set it by the exact time, and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to set it for me. Then he said, "She is four min- utes slow- regulator wants pushing up." I tried to stop him- tried to make him understand that the watch kept perfect time. But no; all this human cabbage could see was that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator MUST be pushed up a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed. My watch began to gain. It gained faster and faster day by day. Within the week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred and fifty in the shade. At the end of two months it had left all the timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen days ahead of the almanac. It was away into November enjoying the snow, while the October leaves were still turn- ing. It hurried up house rent, bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not abide it. I took it to the watchmaker to be regulated. He asked me if I had ever had it repaired. I said no, it had never needed any repairing. He looked a look of vicious happiness and eagerly pried the watch open, and then put a small dice box into his eye and peered into its machinery. He said it wanted cleaning and oiling, besides regulating -- come in a week. After being cleaned and oiled, and regulated, my watch slowed down to that degree that it ticked like a tolling bell. I began to be left by trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch strung out three days' grace to four and let me go to protest; I gradually drifted back into yesterday, then day before, then into last week, and by and by the comprehension came upon me that all solitary and alone I was lingering along in week before last, and the world was out of sight. I seemed to detect in myself a sort of sneaking fellow-feeling for the mummy in the museum, and desire to swap news with him. I went to a watch maker again. He took the watch all to pieces while I waited, and then said the barrel was "swelled." He said he could reduce it in three days. After this the watch AVERAGED well, but nothing more. For half a day it would go like the very mischief, and keep up such a barking and wheezing and whooping and sneezing and snorting, that I could not hear myself think for the disturbance; and as long as it held out there was not a watch in the land that stood any chance against it. But the rest of the day it would keep on slowing down and fooling along until all the clocks it had left behind caught up again. So at last, at the end of twenty-four hours, it would trot up to the judges' stand all right and just in time. It would show a fair and square average, and no man could say it had done more or less than its duty. But a correct average is only a mild virtue in a watch, and I took this instrument to another watchmaker. He said the kingbolt was broken. I said I was glad it was nothing more serious. To tell the plain truth, I had no idea what the kingbolt was, but I did not choose to appear ignorant to a stranger. He repaired the kingbolt, but what the watch gained in one way it lost in another. It would run awhile and then stop awhile, and then run awhile again, and so on, using its own discretion about the intervals. And every time it went off it kicked back like a musket. I padded my breast for a few days, but finally took the watch to another watchmaker. He picked it all to pieces, and turned the ruin over and over under his glass; and then he said there appeared to be something the matter with the hair- trigger. He fixed it, and gave it a fresh start. It did well now, except that always at ten minutes to ten the hands would shut together like a pair of scissors, and from that time forth they would travel together. The oldest man in the world could not make head or tail of the time of day by such a watch, and so I went again to have the thing re- paired. This person said that the crystal had got bent, and that the mainspring was not straight. He also remarked that part of the works needed half- soling. He made these things all right, and then my timepiece performed unexceptionably, save that now and then, after working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands.

"It's About Time:Mark Twain's "My Watch" and Relativity"

by

Hugh Henderson

Plano Senior High School, Plano, TX

The Physics Teacher, Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 378–379

September 2005

©2005 American Association of Physics Teachers

Over three decades before Einstein's year of miracles, the American humorist Mark Twain published an essay titled "My Watch,"1 in which he recounts his experiences with a previously reliable pocket watch and those who tried to rehabilitate it. He begins his essay by confessing his first error:

My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining, and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized messenger and forerunner of calamity.

Twain then sets the watch by guess, and takes it to the "chief jeweler's to set it by the exact time." To Twain's dismay, the jeweler insists on opening it up and adjusting the regulator inside the watch, and the watch begins to gain time.

It gained faster and faster day by day. Within a week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred and fifty in the shade. At the end of two months, it had left all the timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen days ahead of the almanac. It was away into November enjoying the snow, while the October leaves were still turning. It hurried up house rent, bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not abide it.

The effect Twain facetiously describes would actually occur for a watch left behind by a traveler leaving Earth and moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light for a short time and then returning to Earth. Because of his high speed, a watch moving with the traveler would run slowly compared to the watch left on Earth, so that when he returned to the reference frame of the Earth, the watch that never left would appear to have run faster than the moving watch, perhaps "away into November enjoying the snow," while the traveler's "October leaves were still turning." This phenomenon has been verified many times by comparing moving atomic clocks with Earth-bound atomic clocks.

So, Twain takes the watch to another watchmaker to be regulated once again. After having the watch cleaned and oiled, it "slowed down to the degree that it ticked like a tolling bell."

I began to be left by trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch strung out three days' grace to four and let me go to protest; I gradually drifted back into yesterday, then day before, then into last week, and by and by the comprehension came upon me that all solitary and alone I was lingering along in week before last, and the world was out of sight.

This passage could describe the watch of the traveler as compared to the watch left on Earth (although he wouldn't notice the lagging of his watch until he returned to the Earth's reference frame). Or, it could describe a watch perched on the edge of a black hole, near the remains of a large collapsed star, where time and space are so warped by extreme gravity as to slow time to a near standstill.

As Twain takes the watch to a few more watchmakers, he is told that its barrel had swelled, the kingbolt is broken, the hair trigger needs adjusting, the mainspring is not straight, and part of the works needs half-soling, all causing the watch to run erratically, with the hands at times appearing motionless and other times, like our quantum-mechanical view of orbital electrons, blurred by speed and losing their individuality. When the last watchmaker says, "She makes too much steam—you want to hang the monkey wrench on the safety valve," it finally dawns on Twain what all the unsuccessful tinkers, gunsmiths, shoemakers, engineers, blacksmiths, and steam captains are now doing for a living, all at his expense.

As I introduce the students to relativity in my physics classes, I like to begin by having them read Mark Twain's essay "My Watch" and discuss what our lives would be like if, for better or for worse, time actually could be adjusted in the manner Twain describes. I also read a selected chapter each day from Alan Lightman's book Einstein's Dreams3 to stimulate the students' thinking about the extent to which we are a time-dependent race, and that challenges to our Newtonian concept of time are not always initially welcome. These fictional writings allow the students license to think outside the Newtonian box I have put them in up to that point in my introductory physics course, and perhaps question what other challenges to our paradigms might lie out there in the great ocean of truth yet to be discovered.

References:

1. Essays and Sketches of Mark Twain, edited by Stuart Miller (Barnes and Noble Books, New York, 1995).

2. R. Kent Rasmussen, The Quotable Mark Twain (Contemporary Books Inc., New York, 1998).

3. Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams (Random House, New York, 1993).