In the depths of the curves of space-time, where the endless nets of gravity are woven, a conscious and luminous being was gliding, made of that fluid and subtle substance in which the planets and the stars are set afloat and which covers the whole sky, the substance called aether.
This subtle creature, whose name was Esirî, was of neither flesh nor bone. Its whole being was one with the fabric of the heavens, and its mind was a witness of the divine laws. Gliding through the depths of the spheres, Esirî turned towards three neighbouring bodies knotted to one another by bonds of gravity: the blue sphere Earth, her silver ornament the Moon, and the country of red dust, Mars.
Over each of these bodies stood an appointed luminous spirit, carrying out the divine command and governing the physical laws of that mass. And at the very centre of the three, directing the chaotic and tremendous gravitational dance they perform with one another, the luminous spirit appointed over the phenomenon itself, the spirit of the three-body problem, stood in its majesty.
When Esirî, trembling upon the waves of aether, drew near this luminous assembly, the appointed spirits of the Earth, the Moon, Mars and the three-body problem turned and looked at it with one accord. Noticing the invisible, fluid structure that surrounded it and encompassed everything, they asked in wonder: Esirî, you glide through our heaven, and yet you are neither of earth nor of fire. What exactly are you? Of what substance were you made, that you should be inside all of us and encompass us at once?
Honoured servants of your Lord, Esirî answered. I am a consciousness made of the most basic cloth of all, the one from which our Creator wove the universe thread by thread, the substance of aether. Let me tell you some truths, so that you may understand me and the substance you float in.
I am the first cradle and the ocean of all existing things. When the old books say that, before a single star, a single atom or a single substance had been created, the throne stood upon water, the ground they point to is the substance I was made of. Our Creator first brought this endless sea into being. The first manifestations of his power appeared upon this sea; he practised his art first upon this ground, and then worked this substance into atoms, into matter and into the elements.
As a fish proves to you the existence of the sea, as a flower lays open the meadow it grew in and an ear of wheat the field it took root in, so it is here. The billions of stars shining above us, the Earth, the Moon and Mars, the endless field in which all of them float, that cosmic ocean is my substance. The stars are the fish of this sea, the crop of this field.
format_quote"The stars are the fish of this sea, the crop of this field."
Hasan Bekmezci
A question may come to your minds: how can one single substance both fill space and turn into different structures? Freeze a vessel of water and it becomes ice and is hard; leave it and it becomes water and flows; heat it and it becomes vapour and mixes with the air. In essence all are one substance, yet they put on three different garments. My substance is like that. Its essence is one, but the Creator has worked it layer upon layer; out of this substance seven heavens were brought into being, and the density, the law and the structure of each layer differ, while the raw material is the same.
Think of a human being; he does not consist of flesh and bone alone. Within him are spiritual layers whose existence is certain although the eye does not see them: intellect, heart, soul, imagination, memory. If a small human being was created in layers like this, can this immense universe, the great human being, consist only of the material world you see? Certainly not. Every realm has a heaven and a layer of aether proper to it. I am a living voice of that subtle, all-encompassing and endless fabric.
A distinction is worth making here. The luminiferous aether of the history of physics, the mechanical medium with which the nineteenth century filled space so that light might be carried, was abandoned after the measurement made by Michelson and Morley in 1887; that experiment failed to find, in the speed of light, the difference expected as the Earth moved through such a medium. Modern physics, however, did not put nothingness in the place left empty. Quantum fields are present at every point of space today, zero point energy is measured even in the emptiest volume, and space-time is itself a fabric that bends and stretches. The aether in Esirî’s speech should be read in the classical and theological sense of the word, as the ground that encompasses everything and upon which the art is practised. Modern physics gives that ground another name, but the judgement that space is not empty has not changed.
Having introduced itself and its substance with these analogies, Esirî turned to the appointed spirits of the heavens. Now let me ask, subtle servants of the sky, it said. I glide through this sea, and for ages I have watched your turning and your gravitational contention. When you three great masses come together, those deterministic equations that were thought unshakeable break down. Tell me, what did your Lord intend in you? What do these delicate masses and the chaotic bonds between you whisper to existence?
From within the blue light of the atmosphere that wraps the Earth, the appointed spirit of the Earth spoke first. Esirî, it said, my Lord brought me into being as a blue cradle in the sky, where living things grow green and where consciousness and knowledge put out their shoots. My perfection does not consist only of the water and the soil upon me; as he made it known that he would make the sky a guarded roof, my Lord wove around me an immense atmosphere and an armour of magnetism.
The deadly radiation that comes from the Sun and from deep space, the winds of plasma and the rocks of space strike this protective armour and are destroyed. Without this sphere of gas and this magnetic shield, the oceans upon me would evaporate and living things would turn to ash before they were ever born. Yet I cannot keep this perfection alone. My Lord bound me into this net of gravity so that the silver sister beside me might hold me and the red brother far off might balance me.
The luminous being gliding over the silver-lit Moon joined the conversation. Dweller of the sea of aether, it said, I am a small mass compared with the Earth, but I am my Lord’s key to rhythm and balance upon her. Without me, the axis of the Earth would be flung wildly between zero and eighty five degrees like a spinning top whose wobble has gone. Every few hundred thousand years the poles would become the equator, the climates would collapse entirely, and no complex living thing could adapt. My Lord made my gravity a support for the Earth; I have held her tilt at around twenty three and a half degrees so that the seasons may run in order and one spring follow another.
I hold the oceans in my gravitational arms and bring the shores alive with the tides. I raise the nutrients from the floor of the oceans to the surface and keep the seas from going foul. Every one of my oscillations is a divine seal that sets the rhythm of time and of life upon the Earth.
From among the distant clouds of red dust, the appointed spirit of Mars whispered in its grave voice. I am the red sphere that man sees as desert and barren, it said. Yet my Lord has created nothing in his dominion in vain. My witness begins not with being a shield but with being a lesson. There is no great moon beside me; my tilt therefore does not hold steady as my blue sister’s does, but swings between about fifteen and forty five degrees over hundreds of thousands of years. The ice at my poles migrates towards the equator and withdraws again, and my climate can therefore settle nowhere. What a gift that silver support beside my blue sister is, I know, who am deprived of it.
And the vast craters in my breast are the record of the rain of stone that fell in the first ages of the young solar system. They were not erased from me, because I had no ocean to wear them down and no working motion of plates; I am a memory of what the Earth has forgotten. Besides, the gravitational conversation between us never breaks off. My orbit and my blue sister’s pull on one another in a rhythm of roughly two and a half million years, and that rhythm is read in the climate records held in her layers of rock. I am the outer end of that invisible bond.
At that very moment the lines of gravity filling the space between the three bodies trembled with silver and golden light. The luminous spirit of the three-body problem, the spirit of this threefold interaction itself, became manifest.
Listen to me, Esirî, and you appointed spirits of the heavens, it said. In his mathematics man solves the relation between two bodies easily and takes himself for the master of the universe. But when a third of us enters the system, Newton’s equations jam, and that analytic insolubility Henri Poincaré proved comes into being. People call this chaos and are afraid of it. Yet this is order manifesting itself within chaos.
What would have happened had this chaotic interaction not existed? Systems of two bodies are entirely stable and predictable, and extremely static and dead. Had these threefold interactions not existed between masses, the chaotic pushing and pulling of the solar system’s first age of formation could not have taken place, the great asteroids could not have been flung out of the system, and the Earth could not have settled into an orbit cleared for life.
The Creator has set such a rule upon this phenomenon that an uncertainty of one part in a quadrillion in the starting position gives rise to entirely unpredictable consequences in the future. This scatters the pride of the man who believes he has taken the future wholly into his possession with his formulae, and reminds him of his helplessness and of the infinity of divine knowledge. And our Lord did not set billions of separate rules for billions of situations. He set a single rule of extreme simplicity, which says that the attraction between two masses is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Yet when three masses come together, out of that single rule an infinite variety, a dynamism and an unforeseeable beauty are derived. The future is not a rigid mechanical prison but a living organism shaped at every instant by a divine will.
format_quote"The future is not a rigid mechanical prison but a living organism shaped at every instant by a divine will."
Hasan Bekmezci
Having listened in awe to all these whispers from within the subtle fabric of space, Esirî trembled once more with its luminous being. So nothing in the dominion stands alone, it said. The Earth with the protection of her atmosphere, the Moon with her tides, Mars with the witness of his wandering axis, and the three-body chaos between them with the liveliness of the universe, all whisper the endless wisdom of their Lord. What we call order is not a motionless clock but this divine and dynamic balance inside chaos.
format_quote"What we call order is not a motionless clock but this divine and dynamic balance inside chaos."
Hasan Bekmezci
This assembly in the heavens finds a concrete counterpart in the art of fine watchmaking. Bell & Ross seal this celestial mechanics, and the offices of the appointed spirits in the sky, onto a dial at micro scale with the BR-03 Astro. The blue aventurine plate that forms the dial represents space in the maison’s own description; for the reader it calls to mind that glittering sea in which Esirî glides. At the exact centre of the dial stands the Earth, and the inner face of the sapphire crystal has been hollowed out to give the sphere relief, so that behind the anti-reflective glass the blue sphere does appear to hang in the void.
Each of the hands is a celestial body. The hour hand is Mars, and because it sits on a transparent disc it is called the mysterious hand; it glides over the dial with no visible support. The minute hand is the Moon, made of metal laser-engraved to bring out its craters. The second hand is the satellite, also laser-engraved, and it is the fastest thing in orbit here. The red sphere counts the hours, the silver sister the minutes, and the small satellite sent up by human hands the seconds. For the reader, that arrangement suggests the human consciousness that bears witness to celestial mechanics.
The case that carries this scene is forty one millimetres across and eleven and a half millimetres thick; it is made of microblasted black ceramic, which gives both resistance and the darkness of deep space. Inside it runs the automatic calibre BR-CAL.327, with a fifty four hour reserve. There is no indication beyond hours, minutes and seconds, because the dial already holds three celestial bodies. Black rubber and black synthetic canvas straps are offered, and the buckle is microblasted steel with a matte black PVD coating. A water resistance of one hundred metres lets a dial carrying a scene of space be worn in ordinary life. The model is limited to nine hundred and ninety nine pieces.
The plainness of the dial hides the number of layers beneath it. Each layer is calculated so as not to block the one before it and to let the light through. That the celestial bodies pass in front of one another without colliding is a small echo of the same calculation.
Time does not consist of the ticking of fixed wheels. The protective armour of the Earth, the rhythm of the Moon, the witness of the wandering axis of Mars and the chaotic elegance of the three-body problem find their counterpart on the aventurine dial of the Bell & Ross BR-03 Astro, in the micromechanical dance of the Earth hollowed into sapphire and of the laser-worked celestial bodies. This work on our wrist is a modern temple whispering the endless liveliness and the divine balance of the universe.
The watch on its maker’s own site: Bell & Ross, BR-03 Astro