Why aren't the mechanical watches extinct already?

Porsche's titanium mechanical chronograph with 800 parts is very accurate. Fourty copies were produced in 2005. Just for $150,000, it's yours: and it looks just like a digital watch from the outside.

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Daniel Holz was brave enough to reveal his technocratic character and asked the question how it was possible that companies could still sell mechanical watches even though they're less accurate, heavier, and more expensive than the quartz watches based on the piezoelectric properties of a mineral with the same name.

Dan suggests that people only care about the mechanical watches because they're being irrationally brainwashed by commercials. Well, I also care about the efficiency of things but this is an example of a situation where I see how crazy it can be if someone doesn't see the rest of the world because of that.

Sex has survived, too

Fundie has offered a comment that paraphrased and sharpened Dan's paradox:

Flip through a random magazine, and you are likely to be confronted by one of the great mysteries of modern times: a celebration of non-reproductive sex. For the past 30 years it has been possible to acquire a child without having sex at all. These children are small and light, and do an extraordinary job of being children. 

Nonetheless, there is a flourishing market for non-reproductive sex. The participants are generally large and heavy, are significantly more expensive, and most importantly, are far inferior as generators of children: easily a factor of ten worse than their reproductively unrestricted counterparts. How could there still exist a market for these obviously inferior sex objects? The answer lies somewhere in the unfathomable realm of fashion and marketing.

Well, that's a real paradox. ;-) In this case, Dan would be kind of right. The opinion that sex is fascinating is an irrational artifact of our brains' being contaminated by hormones. :-)

An even stranger question is why would the (mostly straight!) readers of El Pais want to see the photograph of a naked Czech prime minister in the Italian prime minister's villa, especially if his semi-aroused gadget could have been photoshopped, as Topolánek has (not quite) assured his voters such as myself and others. ;-) Why would anyone pay millions to the disgraceful papparazzo who has no respect for the privacy of others?

You know, the case of mechanical watches is remotely analogous. There are many aspects that I find fascinating. One of them is the mystery how could the people produce accurate mechanical watches a few centuries ago, without all the infrastructure we have today.

Nowadays, the boss, namely a computer, decides about the design, and his or her or its human employees have to produce them. But can you imagine how they did all the components, testing, trials, errors, and adjustments in the 1700s?

This craft has been unbelievable

For most human achievements, your humble correspondent can see that he could do the same work, too - or at least the job is qualitatively analogous to something that I could do and the required improvements to invent, discover, or produce something would be just "quantitative" in nature.

But I still feel that creating accurate mechanical watches in the 18th century is not among those things. It's an engineering miracle. It's not the type of science and technology that I had always wanted to follow at an arbitrarily increasing depth but it is fantastic, anyway.

And be sure that it's not because I haven't tried. When I was five or six, I wanted all of technology to be reduced to gears and wheels. So I have drawn hundreds of pictures explaining how various processes could be mimicked by mechanical components - lots of elements for mechanical calculators and similar things. But as a theorist, I have never actually built any mechanical calculators or clocks. ;-)



And holy smoke, what about the reactionary classical music in the background? Hasn't it been superseded by rock, rap, hip hop, pop yet? :-)

Mechanical watches are not functionally equivalent

Many of the arguments in favor of the mechanical watches above were concerned with their beauty, the respect to other people's amazing skills, nostalgia, snobbery, and also the power of marketing, as Dan noticed. (I don't find the word "fashion" too appropriate in this context because old ideas, traditions, and gadgets such as mechanical watches are kind of "conservative" rather than "fashionable".) Anyway, all these reasons to like the mechanical watches could be viewed as being somewhat irrational.

But I think that even at the level of the hyper-rational criteria that Daniel favors, he is missing something.

The matter of fact is that the cheap quartz watches are simply not functionally equivalent. They don't require the same care, they don't produce the same sounds, they may require batteries which may have an unknown (and therefore irritating) health or environmental impact, and so on.

But even if you focus on the accuracy, Daniel simply doesn't have any proof that he is right that this technological branch should go extinct. The mechanical watches he knows in 2009 may be less accurate than the quartz watches. But is this guaranteed to be the case forever?

Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Yes, I think it is likely that in the following decades, the quartz watches - and all technologies based on "more microscopic" technologies - will remain more accurate. But I just don't see any universal inequality comparing the accuracy of the two technologies that you could convincingly prove. They work differently so different kinds of technological breakthroughs may influence the two classes of watches differently.

And is Daniel really so sure that his quartz watches are more accurate or reliable than the Porsche watches I started with? Well, in this case, his bet would be marginally right: the Porsche miracle deviates by a few seconds a day. But can't it change?

If two memes, genes, or technological ideas are inequivalent and, in this sense, "incomparable", i.e. if you're far from proving the inequality suggested above, it is very reasonable that neither of them goes completely extinct. The differences will always be viewed as virtues or disadvantages by different people.

Light-bulbs

We have encountered the very same dilemma when we talked about the fluorescent light-bulbs. Once again, the incandescent and fluorescent light-bulbs differ in many details. People are aware of them, they can tell you what the differences are, and many of those people will consider the differences to be advantages of the classical light-bulbs (color, stable intensity, more innocent chemical compounds inside, shape, transparency of their design, and even the heat).

So unless you are Fidel Castro, you should forget about bans on incandescent light-bulbs. For similar reasons, plasma TVs have many virtues and possible applications that cannot be mimicked by the LCD panels or other technologies. So unless you are another illegitimate brother of Fidel Castro in the EU Commission or the U.K. Labor Party, you should forget about banning them, too.

The percentages of different competing technologies will be changing and they will be influenced by all kinds of considerations, especially the rational ones - such as the accuracy and price of the watches and/or quality of the image, colors, and consumption of electricity in the case of light-bulbs and TV screens.

But it's just not true that it's natural for one of those percentages to strictly go to zero unless you can literally prove that the winning technology is "objectively better in every conceivable respect, regardless of the application". And even if you can prove such a thing, some people will still collect antiquities. The people who buy mechanical clocks are somewhere in between the collectors of antiquities on one side and Dan-like efficient technocrats on the other side. ;-)

Another argument related to something I have already discussed is the following: It's a good idea not to eliminate all of research and development of mechanical watches or incandescent light-bulbs because even if they remain inferior as gadgets for average users, their best models in the year 2050 may evolve into something completely new that couldn't be made out of quartz or fluorescent light-bulbs.

And undergraduate kids are going to learn mechanics before electromagnetism and the piezoelectric effect in the future, too. It's more elementary and closer to Nature (and nature of technology) as understood by our great grandparents. We can't lose the contact with this layer of reality and know-how.

Finally, the cultural instinct of humans to admire fine mechanical devices even if their practical applications are limited is similar to our built-in desire to learn how the world works. Pure (non-applied) scientists should simply have some understanding for that!

Fundamentalism

Because of all these reasons, I think that with all my respect to him, Daniel's approach is one of a narrow-minded fundamentalist - and his desire to eliminate the mechanical watches is similar to the desire of many Muslims to erase the infidels off the map of our blue, and not green planet.

And that's the memo.