Imagine you are a crystallised traveller gliding in an orbit cleared of stardust, out along the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.
You are looking at enormous suns glittering in the middle of the dark, at clouds of gas turning in the spiral arms, at planetary systems bending in wells of gravity. That continuum of space and time which the human eye takes for an unbroken flowing river whispers quite another truth when it is seen from the window of a higher consciousness.
Particles of light, which is to say photons, do not take their steps as an unbroken line as they move through the galactic void. Every cosmic event you witness, from the birth of stars to the swallowing of black holes, is made of invisible micro-leaps hidden in the fabric of the universe. Looking from one end of the Milky Way to the other you understand that time is not an endless and seamless flowing river but a perishable measure, quantised and bounded.
From the gravity of the vast black hole at the centre of the Milky Way to the clouds of dust in its outer arms, everything is woven with a geometric limit of infinite smallness. The Planck length that the German physicist Max Planck set down in mathematics, about one point six times ten to the minus thirty five metres, is the smallest step that any matter takes on the galactic scale.
Think of one of those enormous photographs of the Milky Way that astronomers take with their great space telescopes. Looked at from a distance, the interstellar gases and the lines of light appear to flow as smoothly as silk. But go close to the photograph, down to the level of the pixel, and you meet the smallest indivisible square pixels out of which the picture is made. The Planck length is exactly that smallest pixel of the universal canvas. A photon or a subatomic particle moving through the galaxy does not glide; it advances by stepping from one Planck pixel to the next.
The time it takes light to cross the smallest spatial step in the Milky Way, that Planck length, is the smallest slice of time physics can define: Planck time, five point three nine times ten to the minus forty four seconds.
Through the eyes of a traveller the Milky Way is a divine projector flashing on and off ten to the forty three times a second. In one Planck time the universe stands in one frame. In the next Planck time it leaps to the next frame. Between two Planck moments there is no slice of time that passes, flows or glides.
The sweeping seconds hand on the watch at our wrist, and the sense of flow in our minds, are a visual illusion produced by the eye and the consciousness knitting together leaps of that unbelievable speed. Time does not flow; time leaps frame by frame.
format_quote"Time does not flow; time leaps frame by frame."
Hasan Bekmezci
Seen with the traveller’s crystallised understanding, the fact that time is not an independent god but a bounded measure becomes clear through three principles. First, if it can be divided it was designed: every phenomenon made of micro-packets of five point three nine times ten to the minus forty four seconds has a mathematical architecture. Second, there is the cosmic beginning: the pixels of space and the frames of time were created at the instant they stepped onto the stage of existence; time is not an absolute being independent of the universe. Third, the fabric can bend: near a black hole, where gravity is immense, the rhythm of the Planck frames slows, while in empty space it quickens. Something that can be bent and whose speed can change cannot be absolute; it is only a measured thing.
format_quote"Something that can be bent and whose speed can change cannot be absolute; it is only a measured thing."
Hasan Bekmezci
The Otsuka Lotec No.6, shaped by the Japanese independent watchmaker Jiro Katayama in his Tokyo workshop, refuses that illusion of sliding and flowing time and turns the leap into a mechanical art on the wrist. With a case that recalls industrial analogue gauges and laboratory equipment, the No.6 sets sweeping hands aside and measures time by breaking it up.
Look at the fan-shaped scale on the dial. There is neither an hour hand nor a minute hand in the ordinary sense; two retrograde hands are seated coaxially, one over the other, and both sweep the same arc. Their arbor is placed at the lower end of the fan, at six o’clock, so that the watch can stay thin. A seconds disc turns at the centre, and to the right of centre the date appears.
The real matter is not the travel of the hands but the end of it. When the minute hand reaches the end of the arc it does not slow and drift back; in the maker’s own words it returns to zero instantly. The hour hand behaves the same way. This is a leap you can watch on the dial, and it leaves no intermediate position for the eye to follow.
Katayama treats the timing of that return as a matter of adjustment. He writes plainly in his own note that there may be a difference of up to sixty seconds between the two hands returning to zero; which is to say that what the maker works on is not the leap itself but the alignment of one leap with the other. The same note says that the crown must always be turned forwards when the time is set. That is a sentence about the direction the mechanism was built to face: time runs one way, and so does the setting.
format_quote"Time runs one way, and so does the setting."
Hasan Bekmezci
Inside runs a Miyota 9015 together with the retrograde module Katayama designed and makes himself. The selfwinding assembly carries twenty six jewels, beats twenty eight thousand eight hundred times an hour and runs for about forty hours. The case is forty two point six millimetres across and eleven point eight millimetres thick, worked in 316L stainless steel with hairline surfaces and a see-through back. The crystal is sapphire with anti-reflective and anti-fingerprint coatings. The strap is calf, the lugs twenty two millimetres. The watch is made in Japan and costs four hundred and ninety five thousand yen including tax.
In the 2023 revision of the model the case material went from SUS303 to 316L and the glass from mineral to sapphire; the flanks of the hands and the heads of the screws on the bezel and the dial were bevelled; the lugs are now fixed from the back of the case. None of these are decorative changes; they were made for durability and for stability of running.
The screwed panel construction on the face of the watch, the structural elements left visible and the Japanese lettering all reflect a hard engineering discipline stripped of fantasy. Like the Planck constant itself, that design whispers that the universe is composed not of ornament but of precise mathematical rules.
For a soul gliding through the Milky Way the smooth flow of time is nothing but an illusion. What is real are the Planck frames flashing on and off at every point. The sudden return of the hands to zero on the dial of the Otsuka Lotec No.6 reminds us, with mechanical perfection, that time is not an unbroken flow but a perishable fabric of the universe, measured out packet by packet.
The watch on its maker’s own site: Otsuka Lotec, No.6