At the British Museum, there is a wonderful exhibit of clocks from various periods in history, some older than I thought possible; the mechanical brilliance of their construction attenuated, to a degree, notions of our contemporary technological supremacy.
They also brought to mind one of my favorite metaphors: Karl Popper’s description of “clouds and clocks,” the two representations of determinacy and indeterminacy, which he uses to illustrate how those concepts interrelate in forms other than pure contradiction.
I used to quote Popper often, and probably should get back to his work. Some of his assertions rank among the most important ideas I’ve encountered: simple, subtle, profound, and never in need of obscuring lexical complexity.
