I understand that space travel affects time, but why would it affect the mechanisms of a watch? doesn’t it just go tiktik u know?
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different areas of expertiese with different themes here
– First lets discuss how a watch works.
2 types of commonly used watches today, Mechanical source and electrical source.
– Mechanial source watches use a spring which releases force, this force is controlled by an escapement which uses the vibration of a sping to move sideways to control a brake which stops the and starts the release of power, this is done between 18000 and 1,000,000 a minute but most commonly 21,600 and 28,800 times. these watches are VERY sensative to acceleration, impacts and sudden movements, a master watchmaker called Abraham-Louis Breguet inveted the tourbillon which is a escapement which spins on its own axis to improve this, but it was mostly cosmetic. these watches are accurate to betweet 2 seconds a day and 1 minute a day, depending between a watch like a Rolex or a Grand Seiko which are guarnteed to run under 2 seconds a day, to a Russian Vostok which feels like its made from left over coke cans. you have to understand that people mostly buy them for nustalgic and engnieering reasons, i wear a mechanical seiko chronograph myself, and nasa still uses the Speedmaster Pro which is a mechanical chronograph which was due to be replaced by the Omega Speedmaster X33 but they prefered the old mechanical.
– Electric source, This is where the mechanism is powered by a electrical motor, originally they used a electric motor replacing the mainspring in a mechanical watch, then moved to the bulova accutron which used a tunning fork occilator as a regulating mechanism, then in 1969 Seiko introduced the astron which used a 8Khz quartz crystal allowing a 4 second per day accuracy. today they use a 32Khz quartz cristal, this works on the piezoelectric where when an ionic crystal (a crystal composed of positive and negative ions) is compressed it produces current, now the inverse works as well, so if you cut a quartz crystal to the correct shape (a tunning fork) and apply current to it, you can get an exact vibration requency, which is 32Khz, this gives it an accuracy of 0.5 Seconds per day (yes, a 10 buck F91-W “taliban” is more accurate then a Rolex Oyster Perpetual), and there are high frequcncy or thermocompensated quartz watches that take it to 10 seconds per YEAR, Now the reason why Quartz watches tick is becuase the first quartz watches were power hungry, and they found that moving the seconds hand 1 per second instead of having it move continously saved battery, usually this was a feature on mechanical watches called a dead second and was very respected and desired, the quartz watch basically killed it.
now the space agencies of the world are more worried about batteries exploding then the accuracy of mechanical watches so many have stuck to mechanicals for a long time but we have seen many quartz watches go to space once the batteries were certified to not be ticking time bombs when exposed to the acceleration and radiation of space travel.
Now the second theme here is relativity.
The thing is that the faster an item goes, the more energy it required to move, and the faster it moves though space, the slower it moves through time. Time is a dimension and i suspect also a vector, so the faster its moving in one vector, the slower its moving in others (aka time), as time is another dimension in which an object travels, the faster it goes, the more energy it needs and tends to infinity the closer you get to the speed of light, but time goes to 1/infinity the closer you get to the speed of light.
where the offects are negligable at the speeds we can travel, satelites and space craft which reach a significant speed (a GPS satelite does 14000 KPH) will require correcting a few seconds per year due to time dialation.
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