Time Quote by Robert Duncan

Duncan reaches for a humble piece of material science and turns it into a cosmic metaphor with teeth. “Starting a clock” is a sly way to smuggle awe into a technical idea: melt rock, cool it into glass, and you’ve wiped the slate clean on its atomic history. In geology, that matters because heat can “zero out” isotopic signatures; once the system cools, radioactive decay starts accumulating again in a readable way. The phrase “resets the time” is doing double duty: it’s both a literal description of thermally resetting a radiometric clock and a philosophical provocation about how we manufacture beginnings.

The subtext is that deep time isn’t simply “out there,” serenely waiting to be discovered. It’s partially constructed by the conditions we can measure and the events that overwrite prior records. Melting is an act of erasure as much as creation. Glass becomes a kind of archive that only exists because something violent happened first - fire, impact, volcanic churn - and because the aftermath stabilizes enough to keep its story intact.

“Billions of years later” lands like a punchline and a flex. It telescopes human comprehension against planetary timescales, but it also flatters human ingenuity: we arrive absurdly late to the scene, yet we can still read the timestamp. Duncan’s intent feels less like cold instruction than a reminder that science is a narrative art with strict rules. The clock metaphor works because it’s familiar, mechanical, almost domestic - then it opens onto the unsettling idea that time’s legibility depends on catastrophe, cooling, and the luck of preservation.