The Long Experiment

About this book

Longwatch was built three hundred and twelve years ago to run a single experiment: to measure one extraordinarily slow natural signal, continuously and without interruption, for the length of time it takes that signal to complete, which is roughly three centuries, and to do so on the understanding that if the observation is ever broken, even for a day, the entire experiment is void, because its meaning lives entirely in the unbroken chain. Since then a lineage of keepers, never more than two at a time, has held the watch on a cold outstation, tending the instrument, guarding the calibration, and above all writing, every single day, one line in the Log, so that three hundred and twelve years of days form one continuous sentence with no gap in it anywhere.