Time 9:30am, Friday February 20th, 2026

Presenting Live via Zoom

Title: Will My Luxury Mechanical Watch Work in Space: Proper Time and the Cultural Choices behind Coordinate Time

With all the attention science fiction movies give to time dilation and relativity, this presentation explores a simple question posed by the owner of a million-dollar watch—how will the watch work when he travels to Mars?  To answer this question, the watch owner engages in a dialog with a nasty geographer, a sympathetic baboon, and a cast of philosophers and physicists.  In this discussion, our watch owner is led through the complex relationships between relativity, time on a watch, and the time on spaceship clock synchronized with Earth.  In translating these ideas into terms he can understand, the watch owner eventually realizes he has some choices to make on how he will set his watch and what sort of time it will tell.

Kevin K. Birth is a professor who teaches at Queens College and in the anthropology doctoral program of the City University of New York.  He studies time and how humans use devices, such as clocks and watches, to represent time.  His research spans the archaeological record and current debates about time standards, and he is the author of four books, multiple articles, and he has another book coming out this summer called The Unsettled Clock: The Persistence of Time Pluralism.