I thought MY family had a clock fetish...

BELLEVUE, Washington -- Tom Van Baak's spare upstairs bedroom looks like a cross between the control center of a remote polar outpost and the inner sanctum of a Victorian mad scientist. In reality, it's a home-built lab dedicated to the study of time.

One wall is stacked with a small museum's worth of old nautical clocks, thin slabs of quartz, vacuum tubes of unknown purpose and a few metronomes. Another wall is dominated by shelves overflowing with metal boxes sporting dials, knobs, flashing LEDs and constantly shifting digital displays. A sealed metal cylinder resting on a paint-splattered stepladder bears the not-quite-reassuring sticker, "Cesium Device. Not Radioactive."

"If you have one clock ... you are peaceful and have no worries," says Van Baak, fingering a length of cable connecting two of his machines. "If you have two clocks ... you start asking, 'What time is it, really?'"