Quotes from Dava Sobel

And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able.

One [method] is by a Watch to keep time exactly. But, by reason of the motion of the Ship, the Variation of Heat and Cold, Wet and Dry, and the Difference of Gravity in different Latitudes, such a watch hath not yet been made." And not likely to be, either, he implied.

Halley had become England's second astronomer royal in 1720, after John Flamsteed's death. The puritanical Flamsteed had reason to roll over in his grave at this development, since in life he had denounced Halley for drinking brandy and swearing "like a sea-captain." And of course Flamsteed never forgave Halley, or his accomplice Newton, for pilfering the star catalogs and publishing them against his will.

Harrison, now a London resident and forty-eight years old, faded into his workshop and was hardly heard from during the nearly twenty years he devoted to the completion of H-3, which he called his "curious third machine.

Newton died in 1727, and therefore did not live to see the great longitude prize awarded at last, four decades later, to the self-educated maker of an oversized pocket watch.

To have done work which is widely recognized, to have gained the sincere esteem of many and the real love of even a few, surely these are sufficient reasons to look on life as well worth the living.

How sour sweet music is When time is broke and no proportion kept!

Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes it's configuration underneath them—with continents adrift across a widening sea, the national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace.

Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time itself keeps on.

The energy of God's intent flooded the new heaven and earth with light on the very first day of Genesis. Light's potent good thus pervaded the evenings and the mornings when the seas separated from the dry lands, and the earth brought forth grass and fruit trees - even before God set the sun, moon and stars in the firmament on the fourth day.