I’m sking this here and not in Café Society because I’m not referring to the Netflix series–although the popularity of that show has made it impossible to search the net for any other meaning.
I think the first time I heard the term was 1994, on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s track “7 Seconds.”
It cropped up a few more times for me–enough to convince me it wasn’t random but referred to something specific. At one time I had a vague inkling that it had something to do with the atomic bomb, or bomb testing, but I have no remaining memory of what that link was.
Does anyone have a clue as to why this measurement of time seems to resonate more than (randomness)×(confirmation bias) would seem to account for?
(Wikipedia only lists secondary cultural references and makes no mention of any original reference point.)
Looking at the movie script for Day of the Jackal, there is only one mention of “seven seconds”. A Youtube video shows that this is said at the start of the movie as part of a voiceover describing a fictionalized version of a real-life assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle:
Yeah, this is swamping google searches. My hazy memory, which I haven’t been able to confirm, is that Seven seconds to Midnight represents the timing of an event if the whole (evolutionary?) history of the earth is presented as a twenty-four hour clock.
And no, I’m not referring to the Doomsday Clock. At least, not knowingly.
He fails! An American saves the day and just switches it off. Sadly, the hero is only known as “the atomic specialist”.
(3. The clock on the bomb is highly variable. Jumps ahead quickly then runs at a snail’s pace. And apparently “3 more ticks” is 7 seconds to Bond. Ah, missed script changes.)
Other than this film, I have no recollection of 7 seconds being of significance in general.
The aforementioned Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock has never been lower than 2 minutes (which is also its current setting).
