The Clock is Ticking

Has the word “normal” lost all meaning?  Does it seem like reading about wildly impossible events is now a daily occurrence?  I’m not talking about fake news…. I talking about actual events that defy logic and math by actually happening.

Here are a few random examples:

• A $200 investment in Bitcoin ten years ago is worth over $6 million today.
• Douglas Tompkins, the founder of North Face (the premier source for premium winter outdoor clothing), died of exposure.
• On the day Jimi Heselden took over control of the Segway company, he reversed his two-wheel scooter to make way for a dog walker and drove off a cliff, backwards and died from the fall.
• 
  A digital photograph of a copying machine by the artist Mad Dog Jones is being auctioned by the Phillips auction house.  Anyone can have a copy of the digital photo—though I don’t know why you would want to—but this auction is for the original NFT version.  The current bid is $2.4 million.  I’d show you a copy of it, but the whole thing terrifies me, so the photo at right is of my copying machine.  I will sell you the original photo for the bargain price of only $100,000.  I’ll even throw in the copying machine.
• An Italian doctor, Silvano Gallus, has found evidence that eating pizza will help prevent cancer, but only if the pizza is made in Italy.  
• The governments of both India and Pakistan have confessed that they have on numerous occasions ordered embassy personnel to ring their rivals’ doorbell in the middle of the night and run away before the door is answered.  (If nuclear capable nations prefer to settle differences with Ding-Dong-Ditch, I suppose this is a good thing.) 
• In a group project, scientists in England, France, Poland, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Australia, Norway, and Italy are currently researching to find a relationship between a country’s national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing.
• A 36-year-old California man lived for more than three months in the highly restricted security area of Chicago’s O’Hare airport for fear of catching Covid on the flight home. 
• A Connecticut man bought a small blue bowl at a garage sale for $35.  In a story similar to a blog post a few weeks ago, the Ming porcelain bowl sold at Sotheby’s for $721,000. 
• And lest we forget—as I mentioned just last week—the New Mexico legislature actually passed a sensible piece of legislation ending the illegal liquor license cartel in the state.  Astronomers are still searching for the bright star in the East.

If you are wondering what the actual probability of any of those events were, all I can tell you is that according to Heisenberg, nothing can be verified to a probability smaller than Planck's Constant (roughly 6.6 divided by 10 to the power of 34), where absolute certainty has a probability of 1.  Well, that’s what the probability was before the event happened.  After the fact, the probability is 1.

Which brings us to another incredibly unusual event.  A while back, I wrote about the Paris guerrilla art group, UX, and their activities at the Paris Pantheon.  You can read the full account here, but to summarize their actions, the group surreptitiously created a clandestine workshop in the dome of the Pantheon where they slowly repaired an ancient clock that authorities had allowed to remain broken for decades.

Note.  Guerrilla art is nontraditional art, usually created by anonymous artists and tied to a specific geographic location.  Banksy’s graffiti art is an example of guerrilla art.  Gorilla art is completely different.  Koko’s acrylic painting of a bird ( below right) is an example.  

It is widely believed that the daily chore of climbing a long flight of stairs to wind the clock mechanism led to someone’s administering some “preventive maintenance” by way of several blows with a crowbar.  The clock was neither repaired nor maintained, so for decades, the stopped clock simply gathered dust while the delicate machinery was allowed to rust.  Still, compared to the rest of the French government, the clock was a miracle of effectiveness, for it still managed to be correct twice a day. 

The artists of UX (Urban Experiment) labored secretly for almost a year to repair the ancient clock, in the process fabricating from scratch a replacement escape wheel—an essential clock part.  When the clock was finally repaired and set in motion, the ever-alert officials in the mausoleum failed to notice…. even when the chimes announced the passing of each hour.

Eventually, UX told the managing director about the repairs, who—after reporting it to his bosses at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux—was promptly fired for the sin of allowing something broken to be repaired.  The French government then removed the new fabricated part, once again stopping the clock.  The UX responded by stealing back the escape wheel and secreting it away while they waited for a more amenable government minion.

This is pretty much where my last blog post on the topic ended.  A few years have passed and I can report that the French government has been active.  First, they arrested the members of UX responsible for the dastardly repair, asking the court for long prison sentences for those responsible and demanding that the illicit clock repairman pay over 48,000 Euros in “damages”.  The prosecution failed since the defense proved that it was not illegal to enter a public facility and that, if anything, the clock had been repaired not damaged.

For over a dozen years, that was the end of the story:  The clock hands were stuck at 10:51, the chimes were silent and the directors of the Pantheon evidently went back to sleep.  Today, however, that is no longer the case.

The government finally allocated the funds to repair the clock and hired clock restorer Jean-Baptiste Viot, so that the clock has now been completely restored and is in excellent condition, once again chiming away.  According to Viot, had the UX not intervened and stopped the ongoing decay that had plagued the ancient clock, restoration would have become impossible.  In a very real way, the UX saved the clock.

And Viot should know....He was the member of UX who repaired the clock a dozen years ago.