Oscillator, the biological watch
a crazy idea for someone with a technical understanding to help build
Todays’ clocks are essentially oscillators of a highly regular physical process, like the vibration of a quartz crystal or the oscillation of a pendulum. But oscillators are also present in circadian clocks, heartbeats, and neural rhythms that regulate biological cycles. Time is has always directed how organisms age and evolve.
Today’s quantified self movement has spurred all kinds of devices to measure such cycles — REM-measuring rings, epigenetic clock tests, hormone testing devices — often aided by AI for interpretation and forecasting.
We, biology have outsourced introspection to machines that tell us how rested, young, or even happy we are. Instead of looking at our analogous biology itself, we look at digital numbers on a screen.
Tired of this enslaving approach, a rebellious biological watchmaker decides to bring biological time somewhere it can be seen as it is. The biological watch contains engineered cells from the user to project visible signals at every passing unit of biological time.
The International System of Units (SI) defined the second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation of the cesium-133 atom, which quartz watches approximate.
The biological watch, instead, ticks at the cell’s own tempo. A neuron, an egg, gut bacteria, a stem cell, all tell a different story, as they ages. Unlike the silent ticking of a digital clock, the biological watch reminds the user of two deep truths about life: entropy and finitude.
Naturally, biologizing time means not only to make a strap out of mycelium. It is to understand, imbue with, and remind the user of what it means to be alive, including decay. It is an instrument for introspection.
PS: this was a small creative experiment after reading a bit about cells that ‘can keep time’. If you have deep technical understanding that could bring this to life, I’d love to chat to write a better proposal.