Falling silicon crystals illustrate the passage of time

The passage of time is an interesting concept, philosophically speaking that is. If we are to understand our place in the universe, we can place ourselves on a set of cartesian coordinates, but that doesn't quite give us a complete picture. I'm not talking Heisenberg stuff here, although his uncertainty principle can apply - we're just setting it aside for now. No, we're talking that elusive 4th dimension of time.

Yes, time - without which our universe would be exceedingly static and boring. Without which the term 'causality' would have no meaning. The giant pain-in-the-butt thing about time is that we can only travel linearly through it, and only forwards. Sucks, we know - it means Doc Brown and Marty's adventures will have to remain in the domain of science-fiction. Stupid time.

So, here we remain - stuck in this unbreakable chain of events, never able to break free from our temporal bonds. We find ourselves watching the passage of time for its own sake - willing it to move faster as we wait for water to boil, our paychecks to cash, or the next episode of Lost to air. We can watch numbers blink by on an LED clock, we can sit mesmerized by the rocking of a pendulum, gaze fixedly at circular sweeping hands of our watch dials, or we can go old-school!

We can watch grains of crystalline silicon pass through a narrow opening of glass.

Yep, these magnificent timepieces are simple hourglasses designed to allow a set amount of sand to pass through from one chamber to the next - taking roughly an hour to do so, you can watch causality in action! One grain falls allowing gravity to pull and overcome the friction of another grain of sand behind it. As each flies by, another falls in succession, thus the passage of time. It's a beautiful and mesmerizing thing.

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