Instrument 03 / Nested cycles

Polar clock

The rings move at six different scales. The outer ring closes every minute; the innermost ring takes a year.

Why this clock exists

Babylonian astronomers used base-60 calculations between roughly 300 and 100 BCE; minutes and seconds still carry that arithmetic. This clock nests those inherited divisions inside the day, week, month, and year. Each ring closes and begins again at a different pace. Read together, they make the present look less like a point than a meeting place for cycles that rarely start together.

NIST on the divisions of time