About Time by Alom Shaha and Rebecca Struthers

We welcome co-authors Alom Shaha and Rebecca Struthers to the blog in an interview style format! Gain some insight into their work on About Time.

Education has always been very important to me, although I’d only taught at a university level before writing this book. We have a worldwide shortage of watchmakers and, as someone who discovered the profession by accident, I’ve always known that waiting for kids to hopefully stumble across this career wasn’t going to address the problem. I’m a huge fan of Alom’s work, so when I had the opportunity to collaborate with him on a book that introduces the next generation to a craft I love so much it was one I couldn’t miss.

I mostly worked on the technical horological content and history. One of my favourite pieces of information was discovering a “jiffy” is a real unit of time! 3 x 10-24 seconds to be precise. I think I’d struggle to do something in that much of a jiffy!

From the section “Animal time”, pages 14-15: I love the fact that our family dogs can track time, and scientists believe they do that with their incredible sense of smell. So, they can effectively smell time passing! An interesting side fact is that the dog illustrated by the wonderful Lucy Rose is my own dog and best friend, Archie.

What inspired you to write the book?
I’ve loved watches since I was a child so I was delighted when I met Rebecca, an actual watchmaker. Watches gave us something to talk about while we were waiting for others to join a meeting we were in, and we soon found we connected in other ways. Rebecca asked me to join her on the board of trustees for the Museum of Timekeeping and, on a visit there, I noticed there weren’t any books about time or watchmaking for children in their bookshop. I can’t remember which one of us said “why don’t we write one?” but remarkably, just a couple of years later, we’ve produced a book to fill that gap.

What was the process of research and favourite piece of information you found out?
I wrote a lot of the science sections of the book and I was already familiar with some of the physics of timekeeping from my work as a school science teacher. My favourite piece of information in the book is something I learned from Rebecca – In the 1700s, the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus suggested making a clock that used flowers to tell the time. It made use of the fact that certain plants have flowers that open and close at set times of the day. Sadly, I don’t think anyone has actually made such a clock (not that it would be terribly accurate).

Please include an interesting fact from the book?
From the section “Time and Space”, pages 10-11: In Physics, the concept of things happening “at the same time” is meaningful only within a limited region of space, slightly larger than Earth.

Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Federation.