FabR[Senior Patek Moderator]
26166
Thanks for sharing this, I looked at the (very well written) Hodinkee piece and the topic is indeed fascinating, though personally I'm less interested in this direction of horology.
Jun 19, 2019,06:02 AM
As a quick recap if someone didn't go through the entire article, the novelty of this Citizen essentially consists of refining the engineering behind the quartz of a watch, from a standard 2^(15) Hz frequency on which most quartz pieces run, to a new record of 2^(23) Hz, thus bringing a improvement of a factor of 2^8=256. (In my opinion, I would have been nice of Hodinkee, which wrote a really good article on this, to explicitly add which powers of 2 we are referring to, since the number 2 is critical in the mathematics behind all of this -- for instance, 32768=2^(15); etc...)
To draw a rough but probably meaningful comparison, mechanical watches often run on only 2^2=4 Hz, whence their impossibility to compete in terms of accuracy even with the most unsophisticated quartz watch, since this latter will be at least 2^(13)=8192 times more "precise".
Personally, I view this new Citizen as an interesting engineering achievement -- the next goal, of reaching 2^(24) Hz or higher, is highly nontrivial with current methods --- but mostly unrelated to my own taste in mechanical watches ;-) Cheers.