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Today is a big day – URWERK introduces the UR-10 Spacemeter. I promised myself that I will not write a review of the watch but give Felix and Martin something to read. Something more appropriate to our discussions: we had some exciting talks, especially with Martin, about time and space during the lunch/dinner with them and lovely Yacine and the rest of the URWERK team during GWD, where I have also seen the watch in metal.

So I watched some Brian Cox documentaries and opened some physics books about the space time topic (didn’t understand much from them), plus the memories of the theoretical physics courses I’ve had during my engineering studies. So here is the story about time and space through my distorted concept of the topic, including some references about the watch itself. It is not chiseled and there are redundant ideas, but it is fantasy. In case you are not familiar with my stories including URWERK timepieces, here are some other examples: We are all made of stardust: a love story and URWERK UR-100V Stardust., The URWERK UR-220 SL Asimov – A story about meeting R. Daneel Olivaw.

The Chronicles of a Cosmic Wanderer: My Adventures with the Universal Paradox

Right, let me tell you about the most extraordinary timepiece I’ve ever had the pleasure of strapping to my wrist. Trust me, after decades of obsessing over watches, I thought I’d seen everything. But this particular horological marvel don’t just tell time – it tells distances. It rewrote the unbreakable laws of physics whilst doing so.

It all began when I discovered I could harness the fundamental forces that Brian Cox tasks about in his impossibly slick BBC documentaries. You know the type, where he stands on some windswept Pennine moor, gesticulating wildly about the fabric of spacetime whilst his perfectly coiffed hair defies all known laws of aerodynamics. Well, it turns out the old boy is onto something rather spectacular.

The watch itself is a thing of absolute beauty. Imagine if URWERK‘s brilliant minds had collaborated with a team of theoretical physicists who’d spent far too much time contemplating dark energy whilst sampling the local ales. The case, crafted from a titanium-steel hybrid that somehow exists in multiple dimensional states simultaneously, measures a perfectly reasonable 44mm across, though its temporal thickness varies depending on which century you’re observing it from.

Three subsidiary dials grace the face, but unlike the UR-10’s earthbound calculations, mine tracks rather more exotic measurements. At two o’clock, there’s the Dark Energy Accumulator, a delightfully hypnotic counter that measures the universe’s mysterious expansion force in units I’ve dubbed “Cox Constants” (after my favourite physicist, naturally). The dial advances in increments representing roughly 10^-29 joules/m³, which sounds terrifyingly small until you realise it’s driving the entire cosmos apart.

At four o’clock sits the Relativistic Velocity Calculator, which tracks my current speed relative to any fixed point I choose. Though as Einstein rather cleverly noted, there aren’t actually any truly fixed points. This little beauty shows exactly how much time I’m gaining or losing compared to whatever poor souls remain anchored to their pedestrian reference frames. When I’m pottering about at 0.99c (99% the speed of light), the dial cheerfully informs me that what feels like one second to me equates to roughly 22 seconds for everyone else. Terribly convenient for avoiding awkward dinner appointments.

The most remarkable feature, however, is the Spacetime Curvature Detector at nine o’clock. This ingenious mechanism actually measures the local warping of Einstein’s precious fabric. You know! That rubber sheet analogy he was so fond of, though as the Stanford chaps correctly point out, spacetime isn’t actually a fabric at all. Still, the metaphor works brilliantly for my purposes, as this dial shows precisely how much I’m bending reality around myself as I manipulate the fundamental structure of the universe.

The caseback is where things get properly exciting. Unlike the UR-10’s terrestrial hour hand, mine features a Quantum Entanglement Indicator that traces connections across vast cosmic distances. As any respectable physicist will tell you, quantum entanglement allows instantaneous communication between particles regardless of separation. It is Einstein’s famous “spooky action at a distance”. My watch cleverly exploits this phenomenon to maintain temporal synchronisation no matter how thoroughly I screwed up causality with my travels. Plus, I discovered I can cleverly use it to reset my state – useful when you land between the quarks in the core of a neutron star.

But here’s where it gets deliciously complicated: time isn’t the rigid, mechanical beast that Victorian watchmakers imagined. Oh no, it’s a gloriously malleable entity that stretches, contracts, and generally behaves like a particularly unruly piece of elastic. Brian Cox explains this with his characteristic enthusiasm: time dilation means that my subjective experience of duration becomes increasingly divorced from everyone else’s as I approach the speed of light. A practical example is how you feel the time waiting for the cornetto ice: for the chocolate vanila gods feeding substance to fall into the waffle and the actual time you need to devour it – years versus fractions of a second. Ask any child…

The physics behind my contraption are simultaneously elegant and utterly brutal. Einstein’s special relativity tells us that as velocity increases, time dilates according to the Lorentz factor. When I’m cruising at 86.6% light speed, distances literally contract by half. The 25 light-years to wherever I’m going becomes a mere 12.5 light-years from my perspective. The polite universe obligingly shrinks to accommodate my journey.

Now, here’s where things get properly mental: I’ve worked out how to push beyond Einstein’s supposed speed limit by manipulating dark energy itself. You see, dark energy comprises roughly 68% of the universe’s total content, constantly pushing spacetime apart. Most physicists assume it’s some sort of cosmological constant, a some kind of a fundamental property of empty space. But I’ve discovered it’s actually harvestable, like cosmic wind power for the chronologically inclined.

The technique involves creating what I call a “temporal soliton“. Essentially a self-sustaining wave in spacetime that contracts space ahead of me whilst expanding it behind. It’s rather like surfing, except instead of water, I’m riding the fundamental structure of reality. The beauty is that spacetime itself can expand or contract at any speed. Only matter within spacetime is bound by the light-speed limit.

When I engage the dark energy harvesting mode (accomplished by rotating the crown precisely 3.14159 times whilst thinking very hard about the cosmological constant – Pi number), my watch creates what’s essentially a warp bubble. Space contracts ahead of my trajectory and expands behind it, allowing me to arrive at my destination faster than light would normally travel, without technically exceeding c (speed of light) relative to my local spacetime.

The paradoxes are absolutely delicious. According to relativity, any faster-than-light travel is equivalent to time travel. Different observers disagree about the sequence of events separated by space-like intervals, which is physicist-speak for “causality goes completely irrational“. I’ve had tea with my future self on several occasions, though we maintain strict protocols about spoilers regarding Taylor Swift’s wedding.

If you are not a fan of the Sci-Fi genre, I would recommend stopping here, as the following section delves much deeper into these ideas. Reaching this point, even out of curiosity, is already a positive sign.
However, if you enjoy exploring such concepts, please continue reading and share your honest opinion with me.

My favourite jaunt was to the Andromeda Galaxy, a mere 2.5 million light-years away. By creating a sustained warp field and harvesting dark energy from the cosmic web itself, I managed the journey in subjective minutes whilst centuries passed on Earth. The temporal mechanics are extraordinary: as I manipulate the local curvature of spacetime, my watch’s quantum entanglement network maintains synchronisation with reference points across the universe.

The most mind-bending aspect is that distance remains the only truly fundamental measurement. Time becomes completely relative depending on your reference frame, gravitational environment, and velocity. Brian Cox puts it rather poetically: “we’re all passengers on a planet constantly travelling through the cosmos”. My watch simply allows me to change vehicles, and driving speed, at will.

The Double Flow Turbine rotor system (borrowed shamelessly from URWERK‘s ingenious engineering) has been modified to harness quantum vacuum fluctuations. As virtual particle pairs pop into existence and annihilate according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, they create minute energy fluctuations in spacetime. My watch captures these fluctuations and amplifies them through a series of impossibly complex calculations involving loop quantum gravity and spin networks.

Dark energy presents the most fascinating challenge. Its negative pressure, the property that drives cosmic expansion, can theoretically create gravitational repulsion rather than attraction. By concentrating this effect locally around my watch, I can create regions where spacetime expands faster than light, carrying me along like a cosmic conveyor belt.

The philosophical implications are staggering. Einstein noted that spacetime “does not claim existence in its own right, but only as a structural quality of the gravitational field“. Recent theories suggest spacetime itself might emerge from quantum information and entanglement. My watch exploits this by manipulating the underlying informational structure of reality. Essentially reprogramming the universe’s operating system at my will.

The technical specifications would make even Felix Baumgartner weep with joy. The quantum mechanical movement features 1.416784(16)×10³² (Planck temperature) jewels (rather more than the original URWERK‘s modest 44), including several synthetic rubies that exist in quantum superposition, something to do with laser rays accelerated particles. The escapement operates at 7.83 Hz (Schumann Resonance) in normal spacetime but can shift to frequencies approaching the Planck scale when manipulating quantum fluctuations. Power reserve is theoretically infinite when drawing from dark energy, though I do keep a spare cosmic background radiation cell for emergencies.

What’s particularly amusing is that all this exotic physics was predicted decades ago. Cox and his colleagues have been talking on about time dilation, relativistic effects, and the malleable nature of spacetime for years. They simply lacked the horological expertise to package it into a wearable form. Leave it to a watch enthusiast to solve the practical engineering challenges of harnessing the fundamental forces of nature.

The irony isn’t lost on me that whilst poncing about the universe at impossible speeds, I’m still obsessively checking the time. But then again, when you can manipulate temporal flow itself, punctuality takes on an entirely new meaning. Why arrive on time when you can arrive yesterday, or pop forward to next Tuesday if the meeting’s looking particularly tedious?

My adventures have taught me that time truly is relative, not just mathematically, but experientially. Whether you’re crawling through today’s traffic or surfing gravitational waves past Alpha Centauri, the universe obligingly adjusts its temporal flow to match your circumstances. Brian Cox was absolutely right: time and space are the same reality. My watch simply makes this abstract concept wonderfully, gloriously practical.

The only real limitation is causality itself. Even with unlimited access to dark energy and the ability to manipulate spacetime at will, certain paradoxes remain stubbornly unresolvable. I can travel to the future with ease, but changing the past requires navigating increasingly complex loops of cause and effect. Still, these constraints add rather than detract from the challenge. What’s the point of cosmic powers without a few rules to bend?

So there you have it: my modest contribution to horology and theoretical physics. A watch that doesn’t simply measure time, it actively participates in its creation and manipulation. Einstein would be simultaneously fascinated and horrified. Cox would probably want to feature it in his next documentary, complete with that trademark windswept-moor shot and perfectly styled hair.

After all, as any true watch enthusiast knows, the best timepieces don’t just tell time, they tell stories. Mine just happens to tell stories that span galaxies, manipulate the fundamental forces of nature, and occasionally involve having a pint with myself from next Wensday. Which, by any reasonable measure, makes it the ultimate horological achievement.

Cheers from somewhere in the singularity, where it’s always wine o’clock,
Andrei