![two prints by vija celmins show similar or identical [sic] small square images of the planet saturn in larger sheets of paper. the image is fuzzy, with the rings at an angle, based on an antique photo, i think, but the smaller sheet on the right is an offset print edition based on a single example of the mezzotint print edition on the left. both were made in 1985, and were based on a celmins drawing. they're relevant here because huygens saturn, obv, but also because they are in their own way an experiment in making things the same](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/celmins-saturn-pair-arttransfer-whitney-1024x644.jpeg)
In 1657, two years after discovering Saturn’s moon Titan and accurately characterizing the planet’s rings, the Dutch mathematical physicist Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock, which was an order of magnitude more accurate than previous clock mechanisms.
Huygens spent several years experimenting with pairs of clocks as part of a pan-European attempt to calculate longitude at sea. In a 1665 letter at The Royal Society about their onboard tests of his reinforced maritime pendulum clocks, Huygens reported “an odd kind of sympathy perceived by him in these watches [two maritime clocks] suspended by the side of each other.”
The clocks were found to oscillate in sync, but with their pendulums moving in 180-degree opposite phase. If disturbed, they would resume this anti-phase synchrony within a thirty minutes, or a few hundred oscillations. Huygens thought this resonance, achieved through miniscule vibrations transmitted by their shared base, would help keep clocks at sea in perfect sync. The Royal Society concluded the opposite, that pendulum clocks were too sensitive to disruption to be relied upon.
Huygens would later invent the balance spring, another horological mechanism that set the standard for centuries to come. And the principle of synchrony or entrainment, nevertheless expanded in relevance for oscillators and harmonics across many mediums and fields.
Injection Locking is the process by which coupled oscillators synchronize their frequencies with each other. Depending on conditions, the result can be, as Huygens observed, anti-phase; it can be in phase; or it can be one or both clocks stopping completely, a state researchers who reconstructed Huygen’s rig in 2002 [damn, I hate linking to jstor] called, “beating death.” Huygens was fortunate, the researchers found, to observe anti-phase coupling on very heavily weighted clocks, because as the ratio of pendulum mass to overall system mass increases, beating death becomes more prevalent.
In 1780 Aristide Janvier, horologe to Louis XVI, developed a double pendulum clock that used anti-phase coupling to improve the clock’s accuracy, as Huygens had once expected. Janvier got rounded up in the aftermath of the French Revolution, though, and ended up selling his clocks and tools to Abraham Louis Breguet, who was friendly with Jean-Paul Marat. In 1798 Breguet unveiled a clock he called the Pendule sympathique, which would synchronize a pocket watch nested inside it. Their complexity and cost were prohibitive, and by 1830 only six Pendules sympathique had sold, all to European royals.
In the 1980s François-Paul Journe, then in his early 20s, attempted to create a pocket watch with résonance, his term for coupled oscillating movements. He tried it again in the mid-1990s, after refining his craft, and building his firm in Geneva. F.P. Journe launched the first Chronomètre à Résonance in 2000. It contains two identical movements which present the same time on two faces, side by side, and which keep each other in sync within five seconds/day.
In a brief video explaining the principle of résonance, Tourne talks of the two movements transferring energy back and forth: “ils rentrent en sympathie [in English, start to harmonize].” “Les deux balanciers se mettent à ce moment là à battre en opposition, ce qui est l’équilibré naturelle des choses [The two balance wheels oscillate in opposition, which is the nature of things.]” While on a moving wrist they “annuler tous les effets du poignet [cancel all the effects of the wrist movement],” and “ils annulent” the “perturbations.”
Which is all to say, the history of synchronizing clocks and the emergent science of coupling, entrainment, and résonance runs deep, long, and far, and it supports a universe of metaphors and narratives that include and surpass, but don’t diminish, the ways Felix Gonzalez-Torres imagined when he pulled two battery-powered wall clocks from the Third Avenue Bazaar out of a shopping bag and stuck them behind the desk at White Columns.
And I think we might gain some real insights from some of these synchronized clock readings in the expanded field
Previously, related: Perfect Lovers: Origins
Perfect Lovers (Forever), by Tobias Wong
New Non-Work Category Just Dropped: Felix Gonzalez-Torres Archival Material