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The Watch Maker
Written 2010 · Age 19 · Fiction
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The Watch Maker sat at his desk, working. It had just gone four in the morning and he was almost finished. His old eyes ached with tiredness and burned from concentration while his aged, but practised, hands shook ever-so-slightly as they went about their business. It was extremely delicate work – and dangerous for that matter. Each component of the device had been designed and calibrated with almost unimaginable intricacy, accurate to the nanometre. There was no room for any fault or loose part, not when so much was at stake.

The Watch Maker's brow was furrowed as he looked through the microscope at the small toothed wheel he was placing. He almost laughed at the thought that such a devastatingly intricate, and advanced device still made use of this age-old machine. But it did because it had to – no amount of
Typo alertSilicon ≠ SiliconeScience noteThe author means silicon, the semiconductor element that underpins all modern computing. Silicone is a rubbery polymer — excellent for oven mitts and medical implants, less relevant to quantum watchmaking. A small, endearing slip that is itself a data point about writing at the edge of one's knowledge. → Silicon (Britannica) could replicate the most basic function of a cog, no matter how these new-fangled techies argued it.

The piece was placed. The Watch Maker moved on to the next piece. It was even smaller than the cog, but infinitely more important. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a fine, electric blue thread, no thicker than a hair. One might even say that it had the appearance of an arc of electricity that had somehow been confined to physical form, or more simply, a microscopic version of Zeus's lightning bolt. The Watch Maker placed it in a small notch in the device, beside six others just like it. The machine was almost complete.

All that remained were three tiny diamonds, so small that each had almost as few atoms as humans have years, give or take a few thousand. They were to be placed into a set of chambers that formed a triangle around the inner workings of the device.

The Watch Maker felt a ball of excitement, tension and traces of gas in his stomach. This was it. Almost.

The Watch Maker, Lars Gleistengröber, had spent the better part of his life, which was now approaching a length of almost eighty years, envisioning and designing this little trinket on which so much hung in the balance. He was a tall, lanky fellow, now stooped with age. His once dark hair was now completely white except where it no longer existed on his shiny, bald crown. He kept it short because it got in the way of his work, and so did facial hair, so naturally, he was clean shaven. His sunken eyes were so dark that they seemed black, and when coupled with the deep lines and folds of skin that riddled his face, they gave the impression that he was always miles away. However, years of working with tiny tools at ridiculous magnifications had blessed him with such poor eyesight that he had to wear a pair of spectacles so thick that he looked, for all the world, like a bad tempered, eighty-year-old Power Puff Girl (the green one).

He placed the diamonds in their respective chambers and sealed them. There was one thing left to do. He rummaged around in the drawers under his workbench until he found what he was looking for. He picked the device up gently and slowly clipped it into its casing. Finally, he screwed the back cover into place before placing the little object on the workbench where he stared at it, exhausted and satisfied, for some time.

He stood up and went to the liquor cabinet that stood in a corner near the back of his office. He pulled out a crystal tumbler and a bottle of Johnny Blue and proceeded to pour himself a double. After a swig, or two – well three, for good measure – he walked over to the antique phone that was mounted on his wall. He dialled slowly, even by the standards of those annoying telephones that one dials by rotating a disk with holes to slot one's fingers in – the kind he still used, despite all advances in technology. He could handle
The real thingQuantum MechanicsReal ScienceQM is the physics of the very small — atoms, electrons, photons. Particles exist as probability clouds rather than fixed positions; measurement itself collapses those possibilities. Lars uses it as shorthand for "hard science," which is fair: it is the most counterintuitive branch of physics ever confirmed by experiment. → Feynman Lectures on QM (free online) no problem, but too many buttons just confused him. He waited a moment or two before the man on the other end of the receiver picked up.

"Hello, George?" said Lars. His voice was curt, but it had a gravelly character that hinted at years behind cigarette.

"Lars?" responded a soft, tired voice from the other end. "What in blue blazes are you doing ringing me up at this God forsaken hour? Are you deranged?"

"George," said Lars urgently, "You must come quick. I've done it."

"Done what?" asked George. He sounded worried.

"Something amazing." trembled Lars – he could barely contain his excitement.

"Oh no," said George, "What is it this time? Is Jill okay?"

Jill was Lars' wife, and she was perfectly fine, although she hadn't been speaking to Lars for the past week. Granted, Lars hadn't spoken to her in almost two weeks, not since he discovered how to make the Resonators actually do what they were supposed to. Since then he had holed himself up in his office, working tirelessly, up to this point, this crucial point. Nothing would be the same from today, Lars was sure of that.

"Jill's fine," said Lars, "Just get here as fast as you can. You have to see it."

George's mind was racing as the taxi drove him to the jeweller on the corner of fifty first and seventh where Lars worked as a watch maker and repairman. He was worried that Lars had finally overestimated the curious balance of stupidity, ingenuity and downright luck that had saved his neck more times than George could remember.

Even when he and Lars had served together in the Vietnam War sixty years before, he noticed Lars would often rush into a fray head first, without a helmet, and yet emerge, somehow alive, to tell the tale – and get the medal. George wasn't like that, he was a short, jumpy man, with a face and demeanour that likened itself to a squirrel when he was in a good mood, and a rat when he wasn't. He was three years younger than Lars, but found that he always felt older. He said that Lars was childish, Lars said that he was anal retentive.

After the war George was glad to see Lars settle down with Jill, even if being a watch maker was an odd choice of profession for him. But, to George's horror, Lars developed a fascination with
Cultural contextQuantum Physics as Popular ObsessionContextIn the 2000s, quantum physics became a cultural shorthand for "anything is possible." Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds, and popular documentaries made quantum weirdness a household concept — and a license for fictional invention. George's horror is the correct response to someone who absorbed the vocabulary without the mathematics. → The Elegant Universe (PBS Nova, free) and began to fancy himself an inventor.

On one occasion, Lars had built a contraption which he claimed was a working
. It looked like a small cube, about the size of a die, which glowed electric blue and hovered in the centre of a large metal ring which was connected to the wall socket and to a large screen. The computer worked at first – it seemed to intuitively understand all that Lars was telling it, verbally, to do. But, in true Lars fashion, he hadn't quite thought the darn contraption through. The method he was using to stabilize each
This one is realQubits & SuperpositionReal ScienceA qubit is the quantum equivalent of a classical bit. Where a bit is 0 or 1, a qubit exists in a superposition of both simultaneously — until measured. Keeping qubits stable ("coherent") is genuinely one of the hardest problems in experimental physics. Lars' explosion is metaphorically sound: real quantum computers require near-absolute-zero environments to prevent decoherence. → Quantum Computing for the Very Curious (free) quickly overloaded the power source, blacking out everything in a five block radius. When the power failed, so did the stabilizing mechanism, causing an explosion that somehow managed to destroy every piece of glass and electronic equipment in the building, but left Lars and George unscathed. Jill almost divorced him after that, and so Lars stopped working on anything for almost twenty years, or so George thought. Evidently not, thought George, or he wouldn't be on his way to Lars' office at half past four in the morning.

The cab stopped. George tumbled out of the car and into the shop.

"What is it, Lars?" he panted, "What – what have you done?"

"Have a whiskey." said Lars, offering him a glass.

"You… You brought me here… At five in the damned morning… For whisky? You've gone senile my friend. No doubt!"

"Don't be ridiculous, George." laughed Lars, "I haven't gone senile. The viagra works fine."

"Senile, not sterile, you asshole." growled George. He hadn't gotten over his morning grumpiness enough to find Lars funny. "What do you want me to see?"

"Whiskey first, old boy." said Lars, "And then we can play."

George grumbled all the way through the first sip, and then, upon realising exactly what whiskey it was, he fell silent and stared at his old friend.

"Good, huh?" smiled Lars.

"Yes," said George, looking at his glass, "But you've either done something really amazing, or really stupid, to open this up."

"Hopefully the former, but probably the latter. Maybe both."

"What is it Lars? What have you done? If it's another damn computer I'll smash it with my bare hands before I'll let you turn it on, ya hear?"

Lars simply laughed.

"Follow me."

Lars led George into the back office where he worked and pointed to a small silver pocket watch laying on the workbench. It seemed, for all the world, to be perfectly ordinary, save for two differences. First, instead of a single adjustment dial it had two. Second, the face consisted of four separate clock faces. A large one with slender Victorian hands which simply told the time, and three smaller ones like the kind you find on sports watches. It was certainly more elegant than Lars' other contraptions, thought George, but he still didn't trust the thing. Knowing Lars, this thing could probably do more damage than
Historical referenceThe Atomic Bombs, 1945HistoryFat Man and Little Boy were codenames for the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945, killing an estimated 120,000–200,000 people. George's comparison is not hyperbole: Lars' device theoretically threatens causality itself — which is, arguably, worse than any bomb. → Atomic Heritage Foundation could dream of.

"There it is," said Lars, "My Magnificent Octopus."

"Your what?"

"My Magnum Opus," said Lars, "My life's work. Drink Johnny, why don't you, he can make you laugh any time."

"What is it?" asked George, taking a sip.

"I call it a Wobbler."

"What?"

"A Wobbler."

"What does it do?"

"Well," sighed Lars, "It – uh – well it – um – wobbles."

George was incredulous. Viagra or not, this man had fallen off his rocking chair somewhere over the Mariana Trench.

"You're serious?"

"Well, at the most basic level," said Lars, "That's all it does. You're no fun in the morning, y'know. I spent all night thinking of those jokes. It's actually a
. I call it the Silver STaR for short."

"And what does it do?"

"Well, I'm not quite sure."

"Meaning?"

George felt a shiver of apprehension. Lars was doing what he did best, breaking the Laws of Nature and forgetting the one Law that mattered – Murphy's. Lars always said that Murphy was an idiotic dipstick who was mad at the world because he never got a date. Murphy didn't like that, so there was a mutual hatred between the Law and the man.

"It's calibrated to detect, and vibrate at, the
The big oneSpace-Time Has No Tunable FrequencyPure fictionSpace-time in general relativity is a geometric structure — not a medium that vibrates at frequencies you can dial in. However: gravitational waves are literal ripples in space-time geometry, detected by LIGO in 2015 — five years after this story was written. The author was wrong in mechanism but accidentally right in spirit. → LIGO: What Are Gravitational Waves?, creating a localised disturbance of
This one actually worksConstructive InterferenceReal PhysicsConstructive interference occurs when two waves align — their crests reinforce each other, producing greater amplitude. It is real, measurable, and fundamental to wave optics and acoustics. Lars uses it in a fictional context, but the term itself is correctly deployed. A 19-year-old who has done the reading. → Khan Academy: Wave Interference."

"Disturb the
?" said George, "Are you mad?"

"It's only a localised disturbance." argued Lars, "In theory."

"And what would it achieve, hmmm?"

"Well I'm not sure. Theoretically, if the frequencies are altered correctly, one could move through either space, or time, without disturbing the other."

"So, it's a
?" surmised George.

"No. Yes. Maybe. I don't know actually." said Lars. "All it really does is vibrate at very specific, constantly changing frequencies."

"If they change all the time, how do you match them?"

"That's the tricky part." said Lars. "Because the continuum is tangible, it has resonant frequencies, but it has no mass. Why? Good question. I'm glad you asked. Simply put, the resonant frequencies of empty space are wherever the resonant frequencies of matter aren't. By 'matter' I mean '
Real, misappliedAntimatterPartially realAntimatter is real: every particle has a corresponding antiparticle with opposite charge. Matter and antimatter annihilate on contact in a burst of pure energy. But Lars' claim that "space is where matter and antimatter aren't" doesn't hold — space is never truly empty. It seethes with quantum fields, virtual particle pairs, and dark energy. → CERN: Antimatter', just so we're clear.

"Time poses a greater challenge though, since we only really know what it is because we experience it as a constant progression from one state to the another, usually as
Close, but not quiteEntropy & the Arrow of TimeGestured correctlyLars is reaching for thermodynamics. The "arrow of time" — why time flows only forward — is genuinely linked to entropy increasing. But decay doesn't define time; it is a consequence of it. Whether time is fundamental or emergent is a live debate in physics. Lars gets the texture right even where the precision fails. → PBS Nova: The Arrow of Time. Therefore, the presence and transfer of energy indicates the flow of time and the total absence of energy, shows us where we can find the
Pure inventionTime Has No FrequencyInventedTime doesn't resonate at detectable frequencies in any physical sense. This is the story's central act of science fiction: taking real terminology — resonance, frequency, nodes — and extending it past what the physics actually says. The result is internally consistent, evocative, and entirely made up. That is the craft. → Stanford Encyclopedia: Time.

"If we cross-reference these two sets of frequencies, we find the
Elegant fictionNodal Points — InventedInvented"Nodal points" are real in wave physics — points of zero displacement in a standing wave. Applying the concept to space-time is a creative leap with no physical basis. But as worldbuilding it is elegant: the STaR needs something to grip, and nodal points give it a mechanism. Good technobabble borrows real terms and applies them just far enough beyond their scope. → Wikipedia: Node (physics), which are infinite in a universe as vast as ours. The frequencies found at these nodal points are the base frequencies of the space-time continuum.

"In the STaR, there are seven
Fictional techQSRs vs String TheoryInvented name, borrowed aestheticNo such device exists. The name borrows from string theory, which proposes that all fundamental particles are one-dimensional vibrating strings of energy existing across 10 or 11 dimensions. Real string theory makes no testable predictions at observable scales. But Lars' intuition — that vibration is fundamental — is aesthetically appropriate. → Nova: What Is String Theory?. What they do is cycle through multiple states of quanta at a specific frequency until they match a base frequency for a nanosecond, in which time they 'ping' it, raising a single crest or lowering a single trough and causing a tiny disturbance. Then the QSR cycles backward at a new frequency until the same thing happens again. The QSR 'ping-pongs' through frequencies and each disturbance brings the spectrum closer together until a single frequency is reached. When that happens, the space-time continuum at that specific point in space and time becomes rigid, instead of being in flux, and a disparate anomaly is created in which the resonant frequency of the continuum begins to follow the QSR as opposed to the other way round. The STaR contains seven QSRs and when each of the seven reaches a single frequency, the device, and the area around it, is removed from the natural flux of the space-time continuum and is able to move through it, free of its constraints, simply by altering the frequencies of the QSRs. That's the theory at least. Does it make sense? I need a drink. Gosh, I feel like a scientist."

With that, Lars poured another double.

"What happens then?" asked George. He wasn't sure he liked the idea of fiddling with the fabric of the universe. She was a fragile lady and would certainly not like her prize dress being altered without her consent.

"I'm not sure about that," said Lars thoughtfully, "The disturbance could have a ripple effect and 'unwrap' the universe or the device and the area around it could cease to exist altogether or, very possibly, nothing could happen at all. That's the exciting bit."

"Exciting is not the way I would put it."

"Of course, the STaR could do exactly what I want it to and the world would change forever."

"I think the world would change regardless. How long do the string thingies take to finish their little 'ping-pong' thing?"

"Anywhere from a millisecond to an epoch," said Lars, "I have no way to be sure."

"And what's to say the thing doesn't get lost in time or something? Land up on some caveman's doorstep and change the world as we know it."

"It might." said Lars, "But I put it into a clock for a reason. The mechanical ticking serves as a reference point, keeping it attached to a singular, forward-backward motion of time. Hopefully."

"Toss it." said George, "There is far too much that could go wrong."

"Not on your life!" laughed Lars, "I've worked for years on this thing and today is the day I'll test it."

With that he put his whiskey down and picked the pocket watch up. He popped the two dials up and began adjusting them. When he had finished, he clicked the dials back and put it back on the workbench. The two of them watched it closely; George with the nervous energy of a man standing in front of a hungry bear and Lars with the anticipation of a child at a magic show. After a few seconds, the watch glowed with blue light for a moment and then returned to its original state. Lars' eyes widened.

"The frequencies have become fixed."

They watched it for five more minutes.

Nothing happened.

"Oh come on!" shouted Lars, throwing a glass full of top-notch whiskey at the watch.

The tumbler somehow managed to fly through the watch and into the table, before shooting out back at Lars. Thankfully, the tumbler's aim was slightly off and it promptly exploded against the wall behind the two, thoroughly surprised men.

"What the hell?" breathed George. The universe wasn't happy, he knew it.

"I think," said Lars after a moment, "That it's vibrating through space-time. The workbench is vibrating too. I gave it no direction to move in so it's simply maintaining the disturbance. It's everywhere, nowhere and somewhere, all the time. The only thing keeping it here is the ticking of the watch. Look."

He took a silver pen and held it over the workbench before dropping it. The pen fell into the workbench and promptly flew out, straight into the ceiling, somehow driving the point far enough in to hold it there. George let out a little yelp; Lars laughed.

"Curious," he said, "It seems that it's alternating between here and wherever else it is. Trillions of times a second. Ha!"

"How do you stop it from doing that?" said George, "You can't touch it without flying off!"

"I, uh – well I hadn't thought of that actually."

"You hadn't thought of that?" yelled George, "You created a machine that could be 'unwrapping the universe' as we speak and you hadn't thought of how to turn it off."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa George! Take it easy now. I can turn it off if I can reach it, okay. I just – don't know how to do that. And in case you haven't noticed, the universe is perfectly fine right now."

"Well I'm not," said George, still agitated, "Find a way to reach it. Fast!"

"Okay, okay," relented Lars, "Just give me a moment to think."

Lars stood staring at the watch for some time, while George began to pace the room nervously, shooting glances at Lars and the small silver trinket that was on the verge of giving him another stroke.

"I might just have it," said Lars eventually.

"What?"

"Well, we can't touch it because of the vibrations," answered Lars, "But the workbench is vibrating with it."

"So."

"So, the workbench picked up the vibrations from it. If it can do that, then so can I."

"How, Lars. How do you plan to 'pick up the vibrations'?"

"Like this," said Lars, slowly reaching over to the watch.

He held his hand barely a millimetre over the watch for a while until he closed his fingers around its smooth silver surface and picked it up.

"There we are," he said, as if it had been the easiest exercise in the world.

"Well," said George, "Switch it off."

Lars laughed. There was a glint in his eye that George hadn't seen in years.

"Not yet." said Lars, "Let's see if we can move around, shall we?"

Lars turned one of the dials and promptly disappeared.

"Lars!" screamed George.

He looked around wildly around the office. What was he going to tell Jill? That he had let her idiot of a husband wipe himself off the face of the Earth? To hell with that.

"In here George," called Lars from the store's lobby, "It works fine. Perfectly fine."

"Jesus, Lars!" said a relieved George, "You nearly killed me."

"Well, then this should put you over the edge," laughed Lars, "It's time to move through time."

"No Lars, don't," shouted George, but it was too late.

Lars again adjusted the dials.

"I think," he said, smiling, "December sixth, 1941. My second birthday. I can stop
Historical anchorPearl Harbor, December 7, 1941HistoryThe Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 drew the United States into World War II. Lars wants to prevent it — a classic time travel conceit. If Lars is nearly 80 in 2010 and was born December 6, 1941, he would be turning 69, not 2. A small arithmetic slip in an otherwise charming final plan. → History.com: Pearl Harbor, and still be here to witness the changes. I'll be back for breakfast, I promise."

"You're a fool, Lars," said George, "A genius, but a fool."

Lars clicked the dials down.

The hands of the watch began to spin backwards. George watched in horror as the clothes that Lars was wearing turned into tufts of cotton and blobs of strange grey goo before disappearing altogether. His shoes and belt became pieces of cowhide, before they too vanished. Lars himself, grew younger before George's eyes until a small, two-year-old infant sat where he once stood, staring up at George. The watch too, was victim to this reversal of the natural order. Beside the baby lay a small pile of rocks and sand and three microscopic diamonds.

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"Well Lars," said George to the baby, "Would you mind telling me how I am ever going to explain this to your wife."

The Physics
Where the story meets the science — and where they part ways
3
Real concepts
correctly used
4
Real terms
creatively stretched
4
Invented concepts
dressed in science

"Does it make sense? I need a drink. Gosh, I feel like a scientist."

Qubits and superposition — Lars' quantum computer uses "qubits in various states," which is real. Qubits exist in superpositions of 0 and 1 simultaneously until measured, and stabilising them is genuinely the central engineering challenge in the field. IBM, Google, and IonQ are pouring billions into this exact problem.

Constructive interference — when Lars says the STaR creates "a localised disturbance of constructive interference," the term is correct wave physics. Constructive interference occurs when wave crests align and amplitudes add. He applies it to fiction, but the phrase earns its place.

Decoherence as the failure mode — the quantum computer explodes when the stabilising mechanism fails. This is mechanistically accurate: quantum decoherence — environmental interference destroying quantum states — remains the field's greatest practical obstacle. Lars' explosion is dramatised, but the logic of it is sound.

Entropy and time's direction — Lars connects time's flow to energy transfer and decay. This is a genuine philosophical position in physics. The thermodynamic arrow of time — time moving in the direction of increasing entropy — is a serious idea associated with Ludwig Boltzmann and remains actively debated.

Quantum String Resonators — the name borrows from string theory, which posits that all fundamental particles are one-dimensional vibrating strings of energy across 10 or 11 dimensions. Real string theory makes no predictions testable at observable scales. But Lars' intuition that vibration is fundamental to reality is aesthetically appropriate, and the mechanism he builds is internally consistent even where it departs from physics.

Nodal points of space-time — nodes are real in wave physics (points of zero displacement in a standing wave). Applying them to space-time is invention. But as worldbuilding logic, it's elegant: the STaR needs something to grip, and nodal points supply a mechanism. Good technobabble borrows real terms and extends them just past their legitimate range.

Resonant frequency of space-time — this is the story's central pseudoscientific leap. Space-time in general relativity is a geometric structure, not a vibrating medium. However: gravitational waves are literal ripples in space-time geometry. LIGO detected them in 2015 — five years after this story was written. The author was wrong in mechanism but accidentally right in spirit: space-time is deformable and wave-like. Being wrong in interesting directions is one of science fiction's most valuable functions.

Overall: the invented physics is internally consistent and emotionally true. Lars' explanation follows its own logic even where it departs from real physics — which is exactly what convincing technobabble should do.

General relativity does not prohibit time travel in principle. Closed timelike curves (CTCs) — paths through space-time that loop back to their starting point — are mathematically valid solutions to Einstein's equations. The Gödel metric (1949) was the first. Traversable wormholes, under certain conditions, might theoretically connect different times.

The problem is physical plausibility. CTCs appear to require exotic matter with negative energy density, which has never been observed. Stephen Hawking proposed the Chronology Protection Conjecture — the idea that quantum effects would always prevent CTCs from forming, essentially a law against time machines.

The story's ending is more physically interesting than it appears. Lars de-ages when the watch runs backward, implying that entropy reverses — his clothes return to raw fibres, his body regresses to infancy. This is consistent with the thermodynamic view of time: reverse time and you reverse entropy. The uncomfortable question it leaves unanswered is what reference frame George occupies that allows him to observe this while remaining intact.

Lars' use of the watch's mechanical ticking as a "temporal anchor" has no physical basis but is a beautifully constructed narrative device. It echoes genuine philosophical questions about whether a clock in a different temporal frame remains coherent — and gives the story's final irony its logic: the anchor holds Lars to a moment in time, but not to his age within it.

The story's central premise — "vibrating at the resonant frequency of space-time" — was written five years before LIGO detected the first gravitational wave in September 2015. Gravitational waves are literal ripples in the fabric of space-time, produced by cataclysmic events like merging black holes or neutron stars.

LIGO works by detecting the infinitesimal stretching and squeezing of space-time caused by passing gravitational waves — distortions smaller than one-thousandth the diameter of a proton, spread across a 4-kilometre baseline. This is, in structural terms, exactly what Lars is trying to exploit: space-time is not rigid, it responds to energy, and its response is measurable.

The story doesn't get the physics right. But it correctly intuited that space-time is deformable, responsive, and wave-like. Science fiction's great value is not in being right — it's in asking the right questions before the answers exist. The Watch Maker asked whether space-time could be disturbed and tuned. Physics answered yes, just not in the way Lars described.

Science fiction has always generated plausible-sounding technical language that borrows the vocabulary of real science while constructing fictional mechanisms. Star Trek popularised this with warp drives, deflector shields, and tachyon emissions. The technique suspends disbelief by signalling that the author has done homework — even where the physics diverges.

The Watch Maker uses technobabble earnestly rather than cynically. Lars' explanation of the STaR is dense, internally logical, and delivered with the breathless confidence of someone who genuinely believes it. Crucially, the story doesn't pretend the explanation is complete. Lars ends with "Does it make sense? I need a drink" — an admission of the gap between what he can say and what he can prove.

The difference between good and poor technobabble is internal consistency and emotional truthfulness. Lars' system passes both tests. It may be wrong by the standards of physics, but it is right by the standards of character: this is exactly the theory a self-taught, whiskey-fuelled eccentric watchmaker would develop at four in the morning, alone, over decades, having absorbed half a library of popular physics and none of the mathematics.

The Moment
A 19-year-old in 2010 — what was in the air, and what the story knows about itself

"But, to George's horror, Lars developed a fascination with quantum physics and began to fancy himself an inventor."

Writing in 2010, the author was 19 — which means they came of age during the great wave of popular physics publishing that ran through the 2000s. Michio Kaku's Hyperspace (1994) and Parallel Worlds (2004) brought string theory and higher dimensions to mainstream readers. Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe (1999) became a documentary. Stephen Hawking was already a cultural institution.

This was also the era of The Big Bang Theory (premiered 2007), which made quantum mechanics a comedic backdrop for popular culture. The language of physics — qubits, strings, space-time — had entered the general vocabulary. A curious 19-year-old would have absorbed it through books, documentaries, Wikipedia, and the early science internet, without access to the mathematics underneath.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN came online in September 2008, after years of media coverage about the Higgs boson and, erroneously, the risk of miniature black holes destroying Earth. The idea that machines could do things to fundamental physics was very much in the cultural air. Lars' workbench device is the intimate, romantic version of CERN: one person, one bench, one life's work.

Lars Gleistengröber is a specific archetype: the amateur genius who operates outside institutions. He is a watch repairman, not a professor. He works alone at night on a cluttered bench. He uses a rotary phone, drinks Johnnie Walker Blue, and can't handle too many buttons. The brilliance lives in the margins — and has lived there for decades while Jill stopped speaking to him.

This is a deeply Romantic vision of science: science as individual inspiration rather than collaborative, incremental, institutional effort. Real physics in 2010 was the LHC: 10,000 scientists, decades of engineering, a 27-kilometre tunnel. Lars is the counter-image — and the story knows it. George is the voice of institutional skepticism, the man who remembers all the times the curious balance of stupidity, ingenuity, and luck barely held.

Lars is also a trickster figure. His response to Murphy's Law — that Murphy was "an idiotic dipstick who never got a date" — is the story's thesis about the relationship between recklessness and genius. The story does not entirely endorse Lars. It loves him, which is different.

The story's knowledge has visible edges. "Silicone" for "silicon." An age inconsistency in Lars' December 6, 1941 birthday. George's reference frame, which the time reversal should also affect. The QSR explanation that gets vaguer the longer Lars talks, culminating in "Does it make sense? I need a drink."

These are not failures. They are the texture of someone writing enthusiastically at the limit of their knowledge. The 19-year-old clearly read popular physics for pleasure, absorbed the vocabulary, and was excited enough to build a character and a device around it. The gaps don't diminish the enthusiasm — they are part of its evidence.

Most importantly, the story is aware of its own limits. Lars admits he doesn't know what will happen. He hasn't thought through how to turn the STaR off. He can only say "hopefully" when asked about the watch's anchoring function. George is the story's built-in sceptic, and he is never fully overruled — only outpaced by Lars' momentum. The story doesn't claim to have all the answers. It is a love letter to the compulsion to ask the questions anyway.

Science fiction and science have always had a generative, complicated relationship. Jules Verne imagined submarines before they existed. Arthur C. Clarke described geostationary satellites in 1945. William Gibson coined "cyberspace" in 1982, a decade before the internet went public. Science fiction creates the cultural imagination space in which science later operates.

But the relationship runs both ways. When physicists name things — "black holes," "big bang," "wormholes," "charm quarks" — they reach for the same metaphoric register as fiction writers. The name "quark" came from James Joyce. "Strange," "charm," "beauty," and "truth" are all quark flavours. The line between poetic naming and precise description is thinner than it appears from either side.

The Watch Maker sits exactly at this productive confusion point. It takes real vocabulary — quanta, interference, resonance, entropy, antimatter — and builds a fictional machine from it. Whether a reader encounters this story before or after real physics shapes what they get. Read before: it plants seeds of curiosity. Read after: it is a test of how well those concepts have taken root. Either way, the confusion is generative.

The watchmaker image carries philosophical weight the author may or may not have intended. William Paley's 1802 "Watchmaker Analogy" argued that the complexity of life implies a designer — the universe as a watch, God as its maker. Richard Dawkins repurposed this in The Blind Watchmaker (1986) to argue for evolution as a purposeless, unguided process: a watch without a watchmaker.

Lars Gleistengröber, the literal watchmaker who builds a machine to tamper with time, inverts both positions. He is neither worshipping the mechanism nor arguing it is purposeless — he is opening it up and rewiring it. If the universe is a watch, Lars is not its reverent observer or its disenchanted analyst. He is its reckless repairman.

The ending is the universe's response. The device dismantles its creator: Lars is reduced to an infant, his clothes to raw fibres, the watch to sand and diamonds. He becomes the casualty of the mechanism he tried to master. You can take apart the watch — but you cannot stand outside its workings and remain yourself. The watchmaker, unwatched; the inventor, unmade.

Further Reading
From quantum curiosity to rigorous physics — and back to the philosophy
Start Here — Accessible Physics
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III Free Feynman's quantum mechanics lectures, free online. Challenging but lucid — the closest thing to QM explained by someone who actually understood it. Quantum Computing for the Very Curious — Matuschak & Nielsen Free An interactive essay that teaches real qubits via spaced repetition. The most honest introduction to what quantum computers actually are and why they are hard. The Elegant Universe — PBS Nova Brian Greene's documentary on string theory. This is the pop-physics that saturated 2010 and almost certainly influenced the story's vocabulary.
Gravitational Waves & Space-Time
LIGO: What Are Gravitational Waves? The observatory that confirmed space-time is literally wave-like. Detected in 2015 — five years after Lars' fictional device was invented to exploit this very property. Caltech: What Is General Relativity? Einstein's 1915 theory that mass curves space-time and gravity is geometry. The actual framework Lars is (loosely) working within.
Time Travel & Philosophy of Time
Stanford Encyclopedia: Time Travel Academic Rigorous philosophical analysis of time travel — grandfather paradoxes, closed timelike curves, and what physics actually does and does not permit. PBS Nova: The Arrow of Time Why does time flow forward? The thermodynamic answer, entropy, and why reversing time — as Lars does — is forbidden by the second law. Stanford Encyclopedia: Time Academic Whether time is fundamental or emergent. What it means for time to "flow." The deep questions Lars is gesturing at when he talks about energy and decay.
Sci-Fi & Science in Dialogue
CERN: Antimatter What antimatter actually is, its discovery, its behaviour, and the profound mystery of why the universe contains almost none of it. Nova: What Is String Theory? The real version of what Lars calls "Quantum String Resonators." Whether it is physics or mathematics remains one of science's open questions.
The Watchmaker Metaphor
The Blind Watchmaker — Richard Dawkins Dawkins' response to Paley's design argument via evolution. The philosophical watchmaker tradition this story is (perhaps unknowingly) in conversation with. Atomic Heritage Foundation: Hiroshima & Nagasaki The historical context behind "Fat Man or Little Boy" — the scale against which George measures Lars' device.
Why Quantum Computers Are So Hard

### The Decoherence Problem

Lars' quantum computer works — until it doesn't, and then it explodes. This is closer to the real challenge than it might seem. The central problem in quantum computing is decoherence: quantum states are extraordinarily fragile. Any interaction with the environment — a stray photon, a temperature fluctuation, a vibration — can destroy the superposition that makes quantum computation possible.

### What Real Quantum Computers Look Like

Modern quantum computers from IBM, Google, and IonQ operate at temperatures close to absolute zero (−273°C) — colder than outer space — to minimise thermal interference. Even so, error rates remain high. Google's Sycamore processor (2019) contained 54 qubits; maintaining them required elaborate shielding, dilution refrigerators, and constant error correction. Lars' cube-and-ring arrangement, connected to a wall socket, would face rather more decoherence than this.

### The Verbal Interface Detail

Lars' computer "intuitively understood all that Lars was telling it, verbally, to do." This was pure science fiction in 2010 — voice-controlled AI was not serious technology yet (Siri launched in 2011; large language models came much later). A decade later, this detail turned from fiction into product feature. The story was wrong about the physics and right about the direction of technology.

### The Five-Block Blackout

When the stabilising mechanism fails, Lars' computer blacks out five city blocks. A real quantum computer losing coherence would simply stop computing — it would not release stored energy explosively. But the dramatic logic is coherent: a device drawing sustained power to maintain quantum states, suddenly cut off, with all that potential collapsing at once. The scale is fiction; the principle of energetic failure is not entirely wrong.

→ Further reading: Quantum Computing for the Very Curious (free)
What Is Space-Time, Actually?

### Einstein's Insight

Before Einstein, space and time were separate. Space was the stage; time was the clock. In 1905 (special relativity) and 1915 (general relativity), Einstein showed they are a single four-dimensional structure: space-time. Mass and energy curve this structure, and what we experience as gravity is simply objects following the straightest possible paths through curved space-time.

### Is Space-Time a Medium?

Lars treats space-time like a substance that vibrates at tunable frequencies — like a guitar string or a tuning fork. In general relativity, space-time is a geometric structure, not a medium in the classical sense. It has no mass and does not carry sound. What it does have is curvature, and that curvature can change — which is what gravitational waves are.

### Gravitational Waves: The Accidental Prediction

In September 2015, LIGO detected gravitational waves for the first time — ripples in space-time geometry produced by two merging black holes 1.3 billion light-years away. The space-time distortion measured at Earth was smaller than 1/1000th the diameter of a proton across a 4-kilometre baseline. This confirmed that space-time is dynamic, deformable, and wave-like. Lars' intuition — that space-time can be disturbed at detectable frequencies — is wrong in mechanism but right in character.

### What "Resonant Frequency" Would Actually Mean

Space-time doesn't have a single universal resonant frequency. But confined regions do exhibit characteristic oscillation modes. A perturbed black hole "rings" at specific quasinormal frequencies before settling. The interior of the early universe had its own acoustic oscillations, now encoded in the cosmic microwave background. Real physics has its own version of Lars' idea — it is just far stranger, and far smaller in scale than a pocket watch.

→ LIGO: Gravitational Waves explained
Is Time Travel Physically Possible?

### Forward Time Travel: Already Real

Travelling forward in time is not just possible — it happens continuously. Einstein's special relativity predicts time dilation: clocks in motion run slower than stationary ones. Astronauts on the ISS age slightly more slowly than people on Earth. GPS satellites must correct for relativistic time differences or navigation would drift by kilometres per day. Lars' teleportation ability — moving through space instantly — is a different matter, requiring the violation of causality in ways general relativity does not easily permit.

### Backward Time Travel: Theoretically Murky

Travelling backward — as Lars attempts — is far less clear. General relativity permits solutions to Einstein's equations that contain closed timelike curves (CTCs): paths through space-time that loop back to their starting point. The Gödel metric (1949) was the first. Traversable wormholes, under specific conditions, could theoretically connect different times. The cost in all cases is exotic matter with negative energy density — not yet observed, and possibly forbidden by quantum mechanics.

### The Grandfather Paradox — and Lars' Elegant Solution

Lars plans to stop Pearl Harbor. This raises the grandfather paradox: if he succeeds, the US may not enter WWII, events change, Lars may never exist, may never build the STaR, may never stop Pearl Harbor. The story resolves this without fully engaging the logic: the device unmakes Lars before he can act. He arrives in 1941 as a two-year-old — unable to change anything, but also unable to have not existed. It is not a watertight paradox resolution, but it is a dramatically satisfying one.

### Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture

Stephen Hawking proposed in 1992 that quantum effects would always prevent the formation of closed timelike curves — that the laws of physics conspire against time machines. This has not been proved, but no physical time machine has been constructed. The story's ending — where the device destroys the inventor — can be read as the universe's chronology protection mechanism in action: the watch maker is corrected by the watch.

→ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Time Travel