Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hei there, and welcome to Horrid Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says underneath the
Speaker 1: big clock. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and twenty
Speaker 1: two Street, I stuta and waited for a girl I
Speaker 1: knew at the spot where we agreed to meet. It
Speaker 1: was four minutes of two. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm
Speaker 1: Lauren Folk. Bob and our third co host, Joe McCormick
Speaker 1: is not with us today in his place as an
Speaker 1: extraordinarily long quote. Yes, I I figured, since we would
Speaker 1: save time, would Joe not introducing himself, I would take
Speaker 1: that time and repurpose it for an even longer quote
Speaker 1: from one of my favorite bands of all time. Fair Enough.
Speaker 1: You know, some day we should really put together a
Speaker 1: playlist of all of the songs that would have mentioned.
Speaker 1: Some of them are not safe for work. Like I
Speaker 1: try to, I try to avoid those, but sometimes when
Speaker 1: I I get a little, I get a little rambunctious, punch,
Speaker 1: a little bungee. At the end of the week, Vim
Speaker 1: and Vinegar, and especially when it's like two minutes before
Speaker 1: we're supposed to start recording, and I realized, hey, I
Speaker 1: don't have a song lyric to go at the front
Speaker 1: of the show. I have to admit that every single
Speaker 1: time Joe and I are are podcasting alone with without
Speaker 1: you and what you will be doing very soon, we
Speaker 1: will because you are going on vacations. I will. I'll
Speaker 1: be cruising around. That is I believe where Joe is
Speaker 1: right now, although he could be following my footsteps to Europa.
Speaker 1: Every time that Joe and I are in the studio alone,
Speaker 1: like we we always it's like knol hits record, Null
Speaker 1: are super producer, and then one or the other of
Speaker 1: us goes, we haven't chosen a quote yet? Why did
Speaker 1: Jonathan start that? As like a standard way of opening
Speaker 1: the show. What I should do is also go back
Speaker 1: and find the first episode where I did that and
Speaker 1: just start writing down, like how many times has have
Speaker 1: you used the same four songs? Right? I know that
Speaker 1: I know that there are certain songs I've used more
Speaker 1: than once, and in fact, I almost started this one
Speaker 1: with a song I'm pretty sure I've used before. But
Speaker 1: all of that put aside, we're wasting time and time
Speaker 1: is precious. Time is so precious. Every second counts in
Speaker 1: every millisecond, every nanosecond counts, and we were learning that
Speaker 1: what we think of as a second may not actually
Speaker 1: be a second. No, well kind of okay. So so
Speaker 1: news broke at the end of May, the year which
Speaker 1: we are recording this, in that researchers had created a
Speaker 1: new clock so much more precise than existing clocks that
Speaker 1: were like maybe going to have to change the definition
Speaker 1: of a second. And that got us thinking about the
Speaker 1: history and the future of time keeping, right, And this
Speaker 1: also means, by the way that we have to redefine
Speaker 1: what a second is, by its very nature, we're eventually
Speaker 1: gonna have to readefine one, a New York minute really
Speaker 1: mass fair enough. It's not that our idea of what
Speaker 1: a New York minute or or a second is wrong.
Speaker 1: A second is a second. It's the machines that we
Speaker 1: used to tell time that are that are wrong or
Speaker 1: at the very least imprecise. So okay, you know how
Speaker 1: like how like digital clocks that aren't connected to the internet,
Speaker 1: like like the clock in your car, or an analog
Speaker 1: risk to watcher a wall clock, you know, analog meaning
Speaker 1: like has hands and gears, like like it's the kind
Speaker 1: of clock where you look at it and then you think,
Speaker 1: I remember, I used to know how to tell time
Speaker 1: this way. When I was first writing these notes, I
Speaker 1: I originally started to type old fashioned and then stopped
Speaker 1: myself because where I felt so anxious and where you
Speaker 1: could at least say, like when Mickey's big hand is
Speaker 1: on the two and his little hand is on the three.
Speaker 1: But but so these clocks that aren't connected to the
Speaker 1: interwebs slowly go off time, right, And that's because the
Speaker 1: mechanisms that drive them aren't white measuring seconds correctly, and
Speaker 1: the difference slowly adds up until it's noticeable to even
Speaker 1: our very slow brains. Right. And we could be talking
Speaker 1: about fractions of a second of an error, but eventually
Speaker 1: those fractions of a second add up to a second,
Speaker 1: and eventually those seconds add up to a minute. Now,
Speaker 1: this takes a lot of time, depending on how precise
Speaker 1: that clock happens to be, But even even if you're
Speaker 1: talking super small errors, it does add up over time,
Speaker 1: oh absolutely. And while it may not be terribly important
Speaker 1: to us, there are mechanical applications or digital applications rather,
Speaker 1: in which it becomes very very important. Yes, and uh,
Speaker 1: clocks these days are are even even old fashioned analog
Speaker 1: clocks are really pretty good at doing what they do.
Speaker 1: But that has not always been as precise the case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: As it turns out, if we want to talk about
Speaker 1: the way we are now being able to to find
Speaker 1: a second and keep that time as precisely as we
Speaker 1: currently know how to do it, behoods us to look
Speaker 1: back into our distant past and learn about the history
Speaker 1: of time keeping. Ah. Yeah, because the concept of a
Speaker 1: second is, like in the Grand scheme of humanity, relatively new. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: especially when it comes to time. In fact, the original
Speaker 1: version of a second had more to do with geography
Speaker 1: than with time passing. So you know, I was gonna
Speaker 1: bust out the way Back Machine, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: Do you think I could handle a trip all the
Speaker 1: way back to ancient Egypt? I mean, we haven't taken
Speaker 1: it that far back in a long time. We I
Speaker 1: don't think I've ever taken it that far back. Do
Speaker 1: you think it's safe to be in the way Back
Speaker 1: machine and talk about time that much? Do you think
Speaker 1: it's going to get mad at you could get a
Speaker 1: little time you want? You know what? You only live
Speaker 1: once into the way back machine. You go, okay, all right,
Speaker 1: now we just have to here's the problem. The all
Speaker 1: the digits are hieroglyphs when you want to go to
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt. So it's let's see it's this is ticked
Speaker 1: off kitty cat uh uh, snakehead person and block. All right,
Speaker 1: I got it right in the first try. Okay, So
Speaker 1: here we are back in ancient Egypt. Now, to be fair,
Speaker 1: we believe that timekeeping may go back further than the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptians, but it's so uncertain that I don't even
Speaker 1: trust the way back machine. Yeah, there are there's a
Speaker 1: possibility that the Sumerians had this covered pretty much right,
Speaker 1: but we don't have any evidence of the Sumerians actually
Speaker 1: building any sort of time keeping device of any sort. Also,
Speaker 1: my cuneiform is really rusty. Yeah, I I I'm barely
Speaker 1: hanging on with the hieroglyphs as it is. So one
Speaker 1: thing that we should mention though about those Sumerians. They
Speaker 1: had something that will later on factor in importantly in
Speaker 1: the timekeeping discussion. They loved the number sixty a lot,
Speaker 1: like a whole bunch. Yeah, the Egyptians loved the number
Speaker 1: twelve and the Sumerians loved the number sixty, and sixty
Speaker 1: is kind of a cool number. It makes it really
Speaker 1: easy to deal with certain fractions because there's so many
Speaker 1: numbers that are uh that sixty is divisible by so
Speaker 1: one through six all of those are divisible, or sixties
Speaker 1: divisible by all those uh ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty, and thirty,
Speaker 1: which starts to sound familiar when you start thinking about clocks.
Speaker 1: And so this, this this base of six kind of
Speaker 1: concept is something that was adopted by a lot of
Speaker 1: civilizations from that time and and and location. Right, the Babylonians,
Speaker 1: they said, hey, you know, we didn't dig everything you
Speaker 1: Sumerians did, but we like this sexygesimal base system. Uh
Speaker 1: So we're gonna use that for our astronomy. Astronomical calculations.
Speaker 1: We're gonna when we're exploring stuff in the sky and
Speaker 1: we're describing how it moves and the relationship of different
Speaker 1: stars to one another. This is the bass system we're
Speaker 1: gonna use because it makes it very easy to to
Speaker 1: divide by all these different numbers. Sharing kind of based
Speaker 1: on that. The Greeks also picked it up, yes, and
Speaker 1: so that ended up being very important further down the line.
Speaker 1: But we'll rejoin that, because that's like medieval Europe, y'all.
Speaker 1: When we have to get to the point we're applying
Speaker 1: it to time. So if they weren't using it to
Speaker 1: describe time, what were they using it for. Well, besides
Speaker 1: the astronomical calculations, they were starting to talk about using
Speaker 1: it to describe geometric features and also the describing geography itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not not just space geography, but geography right here on Earth. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: so that you could be able to say things like
Speaker 1: where one place is in relation to this other place,
Speaker 1: other than just all right, you're gonna go down this
Speaker 1: road away for about five minutes, and then you're going
Speaker 1: to take a rat turn the yield crisp crane. If
Speaker 1: you see a guy playing a banjo, you gone too far,
Speaker 1: turn around, come back. Yeah, that's that. I wish that
Speaker 1: I knew the ancient Greek for crispy cream, yeah, or
Speaker 1: banjo at any rate. Uh. The sexogasmal system was used
Speaker 1: to help define these things and arrest knees. Use the
Speaker 1: system to divide a circle into sixty parts to create
Speaker 1: a geographic system of latitude. Um Hipparchus normalized these lines,
Speaker 1: making them parallel because before they were kind of wavy.
Speaker 1: The essentially well arrest the knees used them to connect
Speaker 1: places that he thought were particularly interesting, which didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: mean they went in a straight line. They might lean
Speaker 1: a little to the right, like, hey, this place is
Speaker 1: kind of cool, you might want to check that out.
Speaker 1: D Yeah. So Hipparcus was like, no, we're gonna normalize
Speaker 1: this stuff, make it a lot easier. And he also
Speaker 1: developed a system of longitude, which had three hundred sixty degrees.
Speaker 1: Then you have Claudius Ptolemy, who expanded on this and
Speaker 1: subdivided the three sixty degrees of latitude and longitude into
Speaker 1: smaller segments. So he divided each degree into sixty parts,
Speaker 1: and each of those sixty parts he's subdivided into sixty
Speaker 1: smaller parts. Okay, so so so that's where you get
Speaker 1: that's where you get minutes and seconds, right. The first
Speaker 1: the larger subdivisions were known as the partists minute prima,
Speaker 1: or the minutes, and then you had the second ones,
Speaker 1: known as the partisan minute secunda or second minute, or
Speaker 1: later just second. But it would take more than a
Speaker 1: thousand years for that stuff to be actually applied towards timekeeping.
Speaker 1: It was really applied toward map making and geography. Okay,
Speaker 1: but so I mean around the same time ish stuff
Speaker 1: was happening with early forms of clocks, Yes, sort of
Speaker 1: the Egyptians. You know, if we look around right here,
Speaker 1: you just look a little bit over to the right. Okay,
Speaker 1: you notice there's that big tall obelisk over there, all right,
Speaker 1: So that obelisk, it's for a real important reason. It's
Speaker 1: there to tell you when it's in the early part
Speaker 1: of the day versus the later part of the day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in case you're not aware that it's now later than
Speaker 1: it was earlier. You can look at the shadow. I've
Speaker 1: taken naps where I've gotten up really confused. So actually
Speaker 1: that that could be very helpful that moment where you
Speaker 1: wake up and you aren't even aware of which pyramids
Speaker 1: you're sleeping, like what time of day it is. So yeah,
Speaker 1: these are were very basic clocks. They essentially divided the
Speaker 1: day up into before noon and afternoon, but they also
Speaker 1: would show when the longest or shortest day of the
Speaker 1: year happened to be. If it was the longest day
Speaker 1: of the year, the shadow would be shorter. It was
Speaker 1: the shortest day of the the year, the shadow would be longer,
Speaker 1: so you could tell kind of the time of year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you'd be like, wow, it's really cold out. Also,
Speaker 1: shortest day of the year. Interesting. Um, So the sun
Speaker 1: dial itself would show up in fred BC. So this
Speaker 1: is like two thousand years after those obelisks were the
Speaker 1: early stages of timekeeping. Now these this is also courtesy
Speaker 1: of the Egyptians. So we're just gonna stay here then
Speaker 1: chat about it. The device, the sun dials, had multiple
Speaker 1: divisions on it to help divide up the day a
Speaker 1: little bit better. Also, once you got to noon, you
Speaker 1: had to turn the sun dial a hundred eighty degrees
Speaker 1: around so it would continue to keep time properly. So
Speaker 1: this is the first instance of having to wind a
Speaker 1: clock so that it keeps time. Um. So the Egyptians
Speaker 1: divide the daylight hours into twelve segments. They were really
Speaker 1: big on that number twelve, remember, which is fortunate since
Speaker 1: again sixty is divisible by twelve, so that will come
Speaker 1: in hand you later. So they thought, let's divide up
Speaker 1: the day into twelve, the daylight hours into twelve segments.
Speaker 1: So there became twelve periods or hours of daylight in
Speaker 1: a day. But since the amount of daylight changes throughout
Speaker 1: the year, then the the length of an hour changed
Speaker 1: throughout the year. Okay, So so light time was was
Speaker 1: twelve hours to twelve periods, and then nighttime was night.
Speaker 1: Nighttime at first was nothing. Nighttime was just not the
Speaker 1: day was just go go home. It's just like there's
Speaker 1: nothing to do. Go to sleep. You know, there's no
Speaker 1: you don't have Netflix, we have only so much oil
Speaker 1: to burn. Go to sleep. So yeah, and at first
Speaker 1: nighttime was nothing. But then the astronomers in Egypt, they
Speaker 1: began to develop tools where they were studying the movement
Speaker 1: of stars, and they divided up the night hour nighttime
Speaker 1: hours into twelve as well. So you had twelve nighttime
Speaker 1: hours twelve daytime hours for a total of twenty four
Speaker 1: periods in a day. Right, And they again were not
Speaker 1: fixed length, right, It all depended on what time of year.
Speaker 1: So literally, in the summer you had longer hours than
Speaker 1: you did in the winter. So time did not pass
Speaker 1: the same way from a from the perspective of counting
Speaker 1: the hours, it passed the same way in a different sense.
Speaker 1: If you're not concerned about what quote unquote time is it, uh,
Speaker 1: that's trying to think about going about your day like
Speaker 1: that is very confounding to me. Well, as it turned out,
Speaker 1: most people back then really just need to know is
Speaker 1: it early enough for me to do work? Is it
Speaker 1: getting to the point where it's going to be too
Speaker 1: hot to do work? Is it the time to eat?
Speaker 1: Is it the time to not be awake anymore? Really
Speaker 1: was pretty you know, there weren't a whole lot of
Speaker 1: evites that people had to respond to with yes, no,
Speaker 1: or maybe. They were really kind of simple in that way. Now,
Speaker 1: the Greeks were the first to introduce the idea of
Speaker 1: fixed length hours, but they did this so that they
Speaker 1: could make astronomical calculations. They didn't do it so that
Speaker 1: people would keep regular time. In fact, most people didn't
Speaker 1: bother with that. They stuck with the more casual variable
Speaker 1: our system, and in fact that would hold true until
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages. Um, but that's not the only type
Speaker 1: of clock that was around at this time. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Also right here in ancient Egypt, where we absolutely are,
Speaker 1: were water clocks that were probably developed here. Again, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's basically whatever you dig up is your evidence
Speaker 1: for what was developed when and if it didn't survive
Speaker 1: then you Yeah, but so one was water clock was
Speaker 1: definitely found in a Menhotep, the first tomb, dating from
Speaker 1: around five b C. And uh, they water clocks covered
Speaker 1: a few of sundials or or astronomy clocks pitfalls because
Speaker 1: you could use them when it was cloudy, crazy um,
Speaker 1: and you could also use them as stop watches. The
Speaker 1: Greeks would later pick up on them too, though not
Speaker 1: until around like three b C we think, and they
Speaker 1: called them clip sidras, which I love, which basically means
Speaker 1: water thieves. And it's interesting they're called water thieves. It's
Speaker 1: specifically because of the physical way the clock keeps time, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So so the idea here is that you've got a
Speaker 1: stone bowl with a very small hole near the bottom
Speaker 1: through which water would flow hypothetically a kind of sort
Speaker 1: of more or less constant rate. You put this, You
Speaker 1: put this bowl with a hole in it inside a
Speaker 1: larger basin that's filled with water, and the water will
Speaker 1: slowly fill the bowl if if, if the inside of
Speaker 1: the bowl is then marked with lines, you can tell
Speaker 1: the rough passage of hours by watching the water mark. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've seen a similar one where it was again going
Speaker 1: back to the Egyptian times, where you had a container
Speaker 1: with a very small hole in it, and it would
Speaker 1: allow water to flow through one container into a second container.
Speaker 1: And the second container have a bobber in it. Oh,
Speaker 1: sure that had a water mark that could tell you, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you look at the bobber and you'd say, all right, so, uh,
Speaker 1: three marks have gone by. We're going to call those hours.
Speaker 1: But keep in mind that these devices also weren't precise
Speaker 1: time keeping devices. A rough idea. Yeah, and and I'm
Speaker 1: sure that I mean, you know, as water war would
Speaker 1: change the shape of the whole of the given device,
Speaker 1: your your concept of a pure it of time would
Speaker 1: would also change. But okay, so, uh supposedly devices very
Speaker 1: much like this. We're used to time speeches in courts
Speaker 1: of law circa four thirty BC in Athens, so even
Speaker 1: and ancient Greece we told our politicians, yo, hey, shut
Speaker 1: up for serious, come on, man, sit down, John They
Speaker 1: and okay, I think I think we're going to finally
Speaker 1: have to leap ahead a little bit. Or do I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, do you want do you want to save
Speaker 1: it for medieval times or do you want to you
Speaker 1: know what? We we can save it for medieval times.
Speaker 1: I'm a little partial to medieval times, Okay, fair enough,
Speaker 1: fair enough, so so I'll just mention that that these
Speaker 1: water clocks went mechanical after a few hundred years by
Speaker 1: by letting water the Grecian water clocks, I should say,
Speaker 1: by letting water drip measuredly into a chamber like you
Speaker 1: were just talking about, you can you can raise not
Speaker 1: just a little bobbin, but like a floating piston, and
Speaker 1: therefore do simple work like like pushing a marker or
Speaker 1: even a gear to turn a pointer. And so between
Speaker 1: like one d b c E and five hundred CE,
Speaker 1: Greeks and Romans both we're trying to make the flow
Speaker 1: more constant by regulating the water pressure. And as a
Speaker 1: result of that, some of the devices that they were
Speaker 1: making could like ring a bell or a gong when
Speaker 1: the water would hit a certain point, or they would
Speaker 1: even like push a mechanism to open little decorative hatches
Speaker 1: containing small figurines that would dance around or or move
Speaker 1: astronaut astrological models. Yeah. Um, And And meanwhile in China,
Speaker 1: mechanical water clocks were also in use from around two
Speaker 1: hundred through around thirt hundred CE, including at least one
Speaker 1: that used this big old water wheel like story and
Speaker 1: a half tall water wheel to power dozens of elaborate
Speaker 1: sounds and mechanisms that would dance around and do weird
Speaker 1: little stuff. Man, and I thought the uh, the church
Speaker 1: near my neighborhood, whenever it's noon or six pm, it
Speaker 1: goes pretty much bonkers with its chimes. I imagine it
Speaker 1: had to be even more spectacular with something along those lines,
Speaker 1: although maybe not necessarily quite as regular, Yeah, I would
Speaker 1: imagine not, but still still a party. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: let's get back in the way back machine. We're gonna
Speaker 1: actually jump ahead to medieval Europe and we'll we'll get
Speaker 1: out there. So did you bring your nose? Come on,
Speaker 1: I worked the Renaissance Festival. I've been to dragon Con.
Speaker 1: I can handle medieval Europe. Here we go, Here we go.
Speaker 1: Welcome to medieval Europe. Huzzah. Where food is on a stick.
Speaker 1: And this doesn't look like the Resaissance festival and all.
Speaker 1: This is kind of awful. Yeah, I don't see any
Speaker 1: chicken fried bacon. There's actually awful in the street in Soul.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of awful this is anyway, So it's
Speaker 1: worse than our pus Field trip. Yeah, that was man.
Speaker 1: You never thought you'd look back on that with like nostalgia.
Speaker 1: But here we are in fourteenth century medieval Europe. This
Speaker 1: is about the time where mechanical clocks began to become
Speaker 1: a thing. And at those in those early clocks, they
Speaker 1: had our markings. Uh, some had minute markings, but none
Speaker 1: of them had second markets. And uh. So it would
Speaker 1: actually take about a couple hundred years really sixteenth century
Speaker 1: medieval Europe where you started seeing minutes as a standard
Speaker 1: marking of time. And this is where we take that
Speaker 1: concept we talked about with the geography, and it was
Speaker 1: converted into a time keeping concept. The idea of well,
Speaker 1: we've got these these twelve periods of daylight and twelve
Speaker 1: periods of nighttime that the uh, the Egyptians had proposed.
Speaker 1: The Greeks had formalized that into actual fixed length hours,
Speaker 1: uh for their calculations. We're gonna do that for the
Speaker 1: purposes of keeping time. Then we're going to subdivide that.
Speaker 1: And because they were working with twelves and twenty fours,
Speaker 1: they said, how about we look at sixty. We're looking at,
Speaker 1: you know, a division of sixty smaller increments that make
Speaker 1: up one full hour, and then eventually you think about
Speaker 1: that long enough and you realize, all right, well we
Speaker 1: can subdivide that even further. A minute is still a
Speaker 1: pretty long amount of time depending on what you need
Speaker 1: to do. Right, some things, a minute's no time at all, right,
Speaker 1: If if it's something really fun that you love to do.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're riding on a horse, jousting your Henry the eighth,
Speaker 1: a minute is like no time at all. But maybe
Speaker 1: you're being accused of witchcraft, being dunked under the water.
Speaker 1: A minute's a really long time. At that point you're
Speaker 1: going like, can we break this period up a little bit?
Speaker 1: And maybe we and look at like a fifteen second
Speaker 1: interval if you're gonna be you know, slowly like drowning me,
Speaker 1: like i'd like to can we negotiate this at all?
Speaker 1: So they looked at the round face of the clock
Speaker 1: that they had designed, and the division of the day
Speaker 1: into really twelve segments. You can think of twenty four,
Speaker 1: but really most clocks are twelve segments, right, And then
Speaker 1: we just amend either a M or p M in
Speaker 1: our brains to denote whether it's in the morning or
Speaker 1: it's in the evening UH, and they adopted that sexic
Speaker 1: asimal system, and each hour was divided by sixty and
Speaker 1: two minutes and dividenes again in sixty into seconds. And
Speaker 1: this was the first time we really had a definition
Speaker 1: of a second in terms of timekeeping. UH and and
Speaker 1: all of this, I imagine was also partially driven by
Speaker 1: just the mechanical complexity of clocks in the capacity. But
Speaker 1: because a mechanical clock, if if you guys aren't familiar
Speaker 1: with the inner workings of a of your basic wall
Speaker 1: clock or watch or something like that, is based on
Speaker 1: a coiled spring that you apply tension to buy either
Speaker 1: winding it or exposing into some kind of electricity like
Speaker 1: electrical pulses. And and then UH in the case of
Speaker 1: these these earlier clocks, the capacity of gears that you
Speaker 1: attached to the spring to to react in in regular movements. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like a transmission, you know. You use
Speaker 1: smaller gears and larger gears to dictate exactly how frequently
Speaker 1: a gear will turn within a given amount of time,
Speaker 1: assuming that in fact the clock is wound, and then
Speaker 1: you get the mechanical UH performance where it rotates once
Speaker 1: an hour. For that you know, for the uh, the
Speaker 1: the little the little mickey arm, yes, and and so so.
Speaker 1: As as the spring making and gear making techniques became
Speaker 1: more complex, I'm sure that people started going like, surely
Speaker 1: we can make this more complicated, let's put some seconds
Speaker 1: in there. And in fact, you know, for a lot
Speaker 1: of people's seconds weren't really that important, not yet anyway.
Speaker 1: As much as I joked about the whole dunking of
Speaker 1: people to see if they're witches or not, that was
Speaker 1: not really on the forefront of people's minds in that
Speaker 1: particular scenario. Yeah, but the second was really um thought
Speaker 1: of as important for making those astronomical calculations, and in fact,
Speaker 1: we attempted to standardize it with the International System of
Speaker 1: Units and the The definition for a very long time
Speaker 1: was that a second is a fraction of a mean
Speaker 1: solar day in a tropical year. But all of that
Speaker 1: changed in nineteen sixty seven. So I think we should
Speaker 1: probably just jump the way back machine, go back to
Speaker 1: the studio. Okay, Okay, that's that's fair. I don't I
Speaker 1: I'm pretty much done with history for the day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we can talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, but um, you know, we don't need
Speaker 1: to go there. That's not that long ago, all right,
Speaker 1: and the smells will be barely exciting. Yeah, okay, we're back, man.
Speaker 1: I just realized we've seen the Beatles another time. Yeah, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: sure we can. We can always rev it up again.
Speaker 1: Uh okay. Actually, before we talk about the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: I need to talk for a second about for a
Speaker 1: second about the nineteen forties, because there was a physics
Speaker 1: professor at Columbia University by the name of Isidor Rabbi.
Speaker 1: I think I'm saying that right. Uh. And anyway, he
Speaker 1: proposed that a very precise clock could be constructed by
Speaker 1: measuring the vibration of atoms, and as far back as
Speaker 1: the ninetties had been experimenting with with this discovery that
Speaker 1: when some atoms are exposed to some wavelengths of electro
Speaker 1: magnetic energy, those atoms vibrate very, very consistently, So you
Speaker 1: can measure the oscillations and then use those to build
Speaker 1: a standard for the passage of time. And what is
Speaker 1: actually happening here is that if you have the right
Speaker 1: frequency of energy hitting a particular type of atom, it
Speaker 1: excites the electrons in that atom to higher energy bands
Speaker 1: and then those electrons will come back down to their
Speaker 1: normal energy band. That's the vibration there. But if you're
Speaker 1: talking about a resonant frequency, that in that we talked
Speaker 1: about resonance before resonance is this idea that you have
Speaker 1: found a frequency that resonates with a particular material. In
Speaker 1: this case we're talking about atoms, and it makes them
Speaker 1: vibrate themselves. So, for example, we see this in the
Speaker 1: macro level with the opera singer singing that note that
Speaker 1: is resonant with a particular crystal glass, and it causes
Speaker 1: the glass to shatter. Uh same sort of thing. Instead
Speaker 1: of shattering atoms, you're just making them wiggle on wiggle,
Speaker 1: very precisely, and very quickly, very very quickly, as it
Speaker 1: turns out. So, based on all of this, in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, the International System of Units wound up changing
Speaker 1: their definition of a second to the vibe to a
Speaker 1: particular vibration of the ces um atom or a scum
Speaker 1: atom a given sazon atom at any given time um
Speaker 1: and these suckers vibrate so consistently at when exposed a
Speaker 1: certain wavelengths of light, and uh so a second was
Speaker 1: defined as nine billion, one ninety two million, six hundred
Speaker 1: thirty one thousand, seven hundred and seventy cycles of those vibrations. Well,
Speaker 1: there's your problem. I lose track right around four billion.
Speaker 1: I just lose interest. But now that's amazing. The thought
Speaker 1: of being able to to define a second as something
Speaker 1: that is more than nine billion vibrations of a particular atom.
Speaker 1: Now you might wonder, how the heck can you turn
Speaker 1: that into an atomic clock? Yeah, how do you measure that?
Speaker 1: That's pretty weird. So I'm gonna do my best to
Speaker 1: describe this. Please keep in mind I was a liberal
Speaker 1: arts major. So here we go. First, the thing that
Speaker 1: these are the earlier atomic clocks I'm going to talk about.
Speaker 1: Now we have a different type of atomic clock will
Speaker 1: be chatting about shortly, and then and even more advanced
Speaker 1: type of clock to talk about the future of the second.
Speaker 1: But first, you would heat caesium so that atoms would
Speaker 1: boil off of the gas typically, and you would pass
Speaker 1: that down a tube that's maintained at a high vacuum.
Speaker 1: So then you would use magnetic fields to sort through
Speaker 1: the caesium atoms and passing the ones with the right
Speaker 1: energy state to the next level. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you're separating out ions from from regular caesium atoms, and
Speaker 1: you want just the specific ones that are going to
Speaker 1: react to the microwave radiation you're going to pass through it.
Speaker 1: So once you've sorted them and all the ones that
Speaker 1: you want are going the right pathway, the atoms will
Speaker 1: then pass through a microwave field that has a varying
Speaker 1: frequency within an extremely narrow range of frequencies. One of
Speaker 1: the frequencies within that range is that magic nine billion, million,
Speaker 1: six seven seventy hurts that corresponds with the vibrations of
Speaker 1: the caesium atom. So when a caesium atom encounters a
Speaker 1: microwave at that frequency, it changes its energy state. It wiggles,
Speaker 1: and the atoms continue on, and another magnetic field separates
Speaker 1: out those that had their energy state altered by the
Speaker 1: microwaves and the ones that did not have their energy
Speaker 1: state altered, so the wigglers versus the non wigglers exactly,
Speaker 1: and a detector picks up those atoms the wigglers, and
Speaker 1: that output is data that is proportional to the number
Speaker 1: of caesium atoms striking it. In other words, the output
Speaker 1: says how many atoms were wigglers. And then that way
Speaker 1: you can actually start to tune your device so it
Speaker 1: is closer to the proper frequency, and you'll see that
Speaker 1: number go up. That that number goes because you'll hit
Speaker 1: more ces um adams with the right frequency. You start
Speaker 1: to narrow it down until you get just the right tuning,
Speaker 1: and once you're there, you're you stop. You have you
Speaker 1: have reached the point where you are creating the pulse
Speaker 1: that is a second each time um and then you
Speaker 1: So what you would do is you take your frequency
Speaker 1: number that you had arrived at and the number of
Speaker 1: uh that that really big number we've said a few
Speaker 1: times already, and when you divide the two, it should
Speaker 1: end up being one. That means one second. Right, So
Speaker 1: it's it's a little weird to think about, but yes,
Speaker 1: it all comes down to how many of those wigglers
Speaker 1: are you picking up? And as you pick up more
Speaker 1: and more, you get these pulses that end up being
Speaker 1: exactly or at least mostly exactly one second. It turns
Speaker 1: out that as we get better at measuring things, our
Speaker 1: definition of what exactly is changes. Now. I love that.
Speaker 1: So atomic time keeping created a new approach called coordinated
Speaker 1: universal time, which, despite the fact that would usually make
Speaker 1: the acronym cut cut, it's actually U t C. That's
Speaker 1: what's universal time coordinated. I guess. In the United States,
Speaker 1: we depend upon the U. S. Naval Observatories, master Clock,
Speaker 1: and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Boulder,
Speaker 1: Colorado to regulate our time. They're the ones telling us
Speaker 1: what time it is. In other words, so interesting fact
Speaker 1: U t C and astronomical time don't quite match up.
Speaker 1: So we've got a second that is very precise. But
Speaker 1: when you change it to the real world and the
Speaker 1: way that the Earth rotates, it doesn't. The Earth does
Speaker 1: not rotate according to our beautiful math. In other words,
Speaker 1: so once in a while, I can't trust it for anything.
Speaker 1: I know it's I mean, i'd leave, but it's where
Speaker 1: I've got all my stuff. So it turns out like
Speaker 1: every now and again, we have to throw in a
Speaker 1: leap second, leap second, leap second every ten years or so,
Speaker 1: You've got about eight minutes out of that entire decade
Speaker 1: where you where some of those minutes, those eight minutes
Speaker 1: they actually have sixty one seconds as opposed to sixty seconds. Okay,
Speaker 1: So is so is this because are these clocks aren't
Speaker 1: quite precise enough. Even though we've gotten this precision down
Speaker 1: to the vibration of an atom, they're they're just not
Speaker 1: as precise as they could be. Well, that's that's definitely
Speaker 1: part of the problem, because as time goes on, the
Speaker 1: slight imprecision of these clocks becomes more and more noticeable,
Speaker 1: and you have to correct for that. And it's really
Speaker 1: interesting that such a thing could, even like it's so
Speaker 1: hard to imagine something so small we're talking about the
Speaker 1: difference of nanoseconds here could actually matter that much. It's
Speaker 1: almost like if you were to look at, say, an aunt,
Speaker 1: and you've said that little any ant couldn't do anything
Speaker 1: to me, and then you saw ten million ants and
Speaker 1: you thought, so when there are ten million of them,
Speaker 1: they actually do matter. It's sort of the same with
Speaker 1: these name seconds. Uh. But let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about a slightly newer version of atomic clock, the microwave
Speaker 1: fountain clock, which does not involve putting one of those
Speaker 1: little fountains from like a uh, like a bookstore or
Speaker 1: something inside a microwave. Don't do that. That's not how
Speaker 1: you're gonna get a microwave fountain clock. That's how you're
Speaker 1: gonna get a broken microwave. So they use a slightly
Speaker 1: different method, but they still depend upon caesium atoms and microwaves.
Speaker 1: So you take caesium gas and you introduce it into
Speaker 1: a chamber that has six lasers, all mounted at right
Speaker 1: angles to each other. So you've got like up and
Speaker 1: down and uh and like some on the on the
Speaker 1: actual walls point and inwards. It looks like a James
Speaker 1: Bond trap, but instead of saying no misr caes um,
Speaker 1: I expect you to die, the lasers are actually slowing
Speaker 1: down the movement of those caesium atoms. Okay, so it's
Speaker 1: an atom trap, not at James Bond trap exactly. And
Speaker 1: we also know that movement and heat are essentially the
Speaker 1: same thing. Right as adams move, there are there warm.
Speaker 1: When you start to slow them down, they cool down.
Speaker 1: So the goal is to cool them down to close
Speaker 1: to absolute zero. Once they're at that point, they are
Speaker 1: forming into kind of balls of atoms. So you've got
Speaker 1: these little caesium gas balls that are suspended because they've
Speaker 1: been slowed down so much, and then you use a
Speaker 1: couple of lasers to push them up into a microwave chamber.
Speaker 1: This is the fountain action. So if you imagine a fountain,
Speaker 1: that's that's just shooting straight up, the water shoot straight up.
Speaker 1: In this case, lasers are pushing that caesium ball up
Speaker 1: into the microwave chamber. And then those particular lasers, the
Speaker 1: ones that are pushing the caesium atoms, turn off. Then
Speaker 1: you've got microwaves within that chamber. Some of the microwaves
Speaker 1: are at the proper frequency to make caesium vibrate, and
Speaker 1: when they do encounter the caesium atoms, the atoms will
Speaker 1: change energy states. And as those caesium atoms leave the
Speaker 1: microwave chamber, they encounter yet another laser. We love our lasers.
Speaker 1: Caesium atoms that have been altered by the proper resonant
Speaker 1: frequency fluoresce. They light up and a detector makes note
Speaker 1: of that, and then the system is dialed in. So
Speaker 1: it sounds very similar to the old atomic clock, right.
Speaker 1: They dial it in until that maximum fluorescence is achieved,
Speaker 1: and that defines the natural resonance frequency of the caesium
Speaker 1: atoms and can be used to define a second But
Speaker 1: they these also as accurate as they are, they do
Speaker 1: not keep time perfectly forever. Yeah, they do lose time
Speaker 1: over time. And uh, and we're talking about like a
Speaker 1: nanosecond a month, which seems nothing. I mean, I was
Speaker 1: going to waste it anyway. I was probably spending that
Speaker 1: playing bulled. I was probably playing Overwatch. Okay, uh, but
Speaker 1: but but it does but it does that up eventually
Speaker 1: and and especially digitally, so nonetheless, Okay, we should say
Speaker 1: that the atomic clocks are are really cool for a
Speaker 1: number of reasons. I think a number one because they
Speaker 1: are what keeps our our geo syncritous orbiting satellites basically
Speaker 1: not running into each other. Right. Yeah, when you're talking
Speaker 1: about things like satellites, like communication satellites, or you're talking
Speaker 1: about GPS satellites, you need to have extremely precise time
Speaker 1: keeping in order for those operations to to work properly.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this comes with a whole host of
Speaker 1: problems and challenges. Um, but you're looking at an accuracy
Speaker 1: that needs to be down to billionths of a second.
Speaker 1: So when you have like a nanosecond error in there,
Speaker 1: that's actually a big deal. So each GPS satellite actually
Speaker 1: has four atomic clocks on board, and there are twenty
Speaker 1: four GPS satellites in orbit, and uh a GPS receiver
Speaker 1: on the ground can determine its location by triangulating broadcast
Speaker 1: signals sent from multiple GPS satellites. And then what does
Speaker 1: is it looks at the time stamp on each of
Speaker 1: those factors in how long would it take the signal
Speaker 1: to travel from that time stamp and where you would be.
Speaker 1: You actually have two answers to that, but one of
Speaker 1: them happens to be inside the Earth, So your GPS
Speaker 1: usually ignores that answer. Generally, Yeah, it's like, all right,
Speaker 1: obviously can't be that one, so you have to be here.
Speaker 1: But knowing that you have these potentials for errors, you
Speaker 1: actually that that translates into a less precise positioning. When
Speaker 1: you're getting your read out, it may be accurate to
Speaker 1: just a few meters, which is fine if you're traveling
Speaker 1: around and you're driving and you know, generally speaking, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna have an issue where you're suddenly realizing need
Speaker 1: to turn a mile back. Share it, but it does
Speaker 1: explain why. For example, if you have your WiFi off,
Speaker 1: your GPS may think that you're on the other side
Speaker 1: of a bridge that you haven't crossed yet, or something
Speaker 1: like that or yeah, or I'll read you the same
Speaker 1: instruction off twice because it's just glitching as to where
Speaker 1: precisely your your car is. Or if you're using something
Speaker 1: like a car service app and you see where you
Speaker 1: are and you know where you are based like you
Speaker 1: see where you are on the map and you see
Speaker 1: where you are in real life, and you realize that
Speaker 1: if you pen the point that it shows you on
Speaker 1: the map, you're gonna have to walk another block to
Speaker 1: get to that car. You're like, no, I want to
Speaker 1: be right. Those apps are particularly bad at that. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the issue is. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's on the app side or if it's my phone's GPS.
Speaker 1: But anyway, So, one of the cool things about space
Speaker 1: and satellites in time is that you have to take
Speaker 1: into account both special and general relativity. That's always sighting
Speaker 1: because it messes with dime. So right, okay, because because
Speaker 1: satellites are are are moving relative to a single point
Speaker 1: on the ground. Yes, well, and if you're talking about
Speaker 1: a geosynchronous satellite, it's moving. It's moving like if you
Speaker 1: were looking up you would always see it, right if
Speaker 1: you were directly below it, which means it actually has
Speaker 1: to travel faster. It's going a further distance in the
Speaker 1: same amount of time, so it's traveling faster than the
Speaker 1: air's rotation share the same way that a track runner
Speaker 1: on the outer side of the track is going to
Speaker 1: have to run a little bit faster than the inner
Speaker 1: truck crowder to keep up. Exactly. So you start to think,
Speaker 1: all right, we're talking about time dilation here, how does that?
Speaker 1: How big a problem is that? It's pretty huge. So
Speaker 1: we just talked about how a nanosecond a month was
Speaker 1: a big deal. First of all, you have to look
Speaker 1: at special relativity. That's the one with the time dilation effect.
Speaker 1: That's when you're talking about the speed that ends up
Speaker 1: about seven micro seconds of difference. That means the clocks
Speaker 1: aboard the satellite, due to special relativity, we'll move seven
Speaker 1: micro seconds slower than a clock on the ground. Kay,
Speaker 1: So that means you have to figure that out factor
Speaker 1: that in except you also have to remember about general relativity.
Speaker 1: The general relativity tells us that the satellite is orbiting
Speaker 1: high above the Earth, where the curvature of space time
Speaker 1: is less than what we experience here on the Earth's surface.
Speaker 1: Exactly the Earth is a giant mass. For us, it's
Speaker 1: a giant mass. For the Sun, it's nothing, but for
Speaker 1: us it's for us, it's pretty big. Again, it's where
Speaker 1: we keep all our stuff. So there's a pretty big mass. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so that it so. So a clock here on
Speaker 1: on on the ground, the clock on my on my wrist,
Speaker 1: if I had such a thing, would be it would
Speaker 1: actually be going faster. It would be going faster because
Speaker 1: of the curvature of spacetime, so it would actually be
Speaker 1: going your wristwatch clock would be going slower than the
Speaker 1: one that's aboard the satellite. So special relativity says that
Speaker 1: the clock aboard the satellite is gonna go a little
Speaker 1: slower than ours. Right, that's the whole idea that if
Speaker 1: you were to travel it near the speed of light
Speaker 1: and came back, time would have passed less. Time would
Speaker 1: have seemed to have passed to you than to everybody
Speaker 1: on Earth. But according to general relativity, it's the clock
Speaker 1: and the satellite is going faster exactly, so microseconds, so
Speaker 1: you have to, yes, exactly, You've got to take the
Speaker 1: seven microseconds where it would have been going slower, and
Speaker 1: the forty five microseconds where it would be going faster,
Speaker 1: and you come up with thirty eight microseconds distance difference,
Speaker 1: and so GPS systems take this into account. I know,
Speaker 1: I just had GPS systems and I'm like saying, a
Speaker 1: t M machine and pin number, But it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: That's not what I was cringing at. Just the math
Speaker 1: caught up with me. Yeah, thirty eight microseconds difference, so
Speaker 1: you have to account for that. And we're looking for
Speaker 1: an accuracy down to twenty to thirty nanoseconds. So nanoseconds
Speaker 1: are much smaller than microseconds. It's a big deal. And
Speaker 1: and and real errors would pile up due to these
Speaker 1: due to these mistakes exactly. So if we did not
Speaker 1: correct for us, on the first day, we'd be thinking, uh,
Speaker 1: all right, well this isn't great, but it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's usable. And then as the day goes
Speaker 1: on would be thinking, wow, this is this is getting
Speaker 1: less cool. And then the next day we'd be thinking
Speaker 1: this is completely inaccurate, because the errors would be enough
Speaker 1: to account for a ten kilometer error per day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so these little bits of time really make a big difference,
Speaker 1: which is why you want to have a really precise
Speaker 1: timekeeping device. Um. So, one way that they correct for
Speaker 1: this is they actually make sure that the clocks aboard
Speaker 1: the satellites tick at a slightly slower rate before putting
Speaker 1: them up in orbit, because then general relativity will take
Speaker 1: care of the rest and they'll start ticking at the
Speaker 1: rate that they should be taking at, which is kind
Speaker 1: of like you know that sort of thing where you've
Speaker 1: already planned for the thing to go wrong, Like you're
Speaker 1: not trying to stop the thing from going wrong. You're
Speaker 1: just like, well, yeah, well this is gonna happen, so
Speaker 1: here you go. This is what my life is now.
Speaker 1: It's just how the that's just how physics work, y'all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: uh okay, but that's not even atomic. Clocks are not
Speaker 1: even the most precise type of clock that human people
Speaker 1: have created. I know where you're going, and I'm already crying.
Speaker 1: I know what. I'm sorry you and you got to
Speaker 1: the notes faster than I could, so it's your fault. Really. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: So the clock that inspired us to do this episode
Speaker 1: is a type of optical clock. Optical clocks, and I
Speaker 1: looking at the clock on my wrist, hypothetically, if I
Speaker 1: had such a using optics right now. Uh, these use
Speaker 1: these depend very heavily on lasers, and again with the lasers.
Speaker 1: So we had in our notes how they work. And
Speaker 1: I almost just put a frowny face sticks to it
Speaker 1: because I started reading how this works, and it's so
Speaker 1: complicated that, first of all, I gotta be upfront, I
Speaker 1: do not understand it. All right, that's just me being
Speaker 1: I'm being straight with you guy. Yeah, yeah, neither of
Speaker 1: us are laser physicists. Yeah, I'm not a laser scientist. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not a second scientist either. But they're very, very complicated,
Speaker 1: and as I was reading it, I just realized that
Speaker 1: it would take me probably weeks of study to really
Speaker 1: get a basic understanding what's going on here. But uh,
Speaker 1: they work with lasers and adams and specific frequencies. And
Speaker 1: here's the problem. It's so technical. Uh there are phrases
Speaker 1: like optical frequency standards, forbidden transitions. I didn't know there
Speaker 1: were such things Doppler broadening and optical clockwork. And I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure I don't understand any of it. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: forbidden transition sounds like something out of Welcome to night
Speaker 1: Vale more than exactly so okay, but but can you
Speaker 1: can you give us like the very very very basic yes.
Speaker 1: So optical clocks they don't necessarily rely on Just let
Speaker 1: me put it this way. There are different types of
Speaker 1: optical clocks, and they work on different types of particles. Right, So,
Speaker 1: with atomic clocks, were typically talking about either caesium or rubidium. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's rubidium. But at any rate, we're only
Speaker 1: talking about those. The optical clocks there are a lot
Speaker 1: more options, so you can talk about certain atoms or
Speaker 1: ions or even molecules depending upon the type of optical
Speaker 1: clock you've got set up. And the optical clocks can
Speaker 1: correct for caesium clock drift, which is good. So they
Speaker 1: are more precise. They can divide time up into ever
Speaker 1: smaller amounts um, and they are really I mean that's
Speaker 1: really important because the more precise you get, the more
Speaker 1: accurate your timekeeping is. But what they're essentially doing is
Speaker 1: slowing these atoms and ions and molecules down to microwave
Speaker 1: frequency standards, which is similar to what the caesium atomic
Speaker 1: clock us. Uh So the idea being that light frequencies
Speaker 1: are way too fast. Uh, they're much faster than the
Speaker 1: micro Even with that nine billion number, that's slow compared
Speaker 1: to what the light frequencies are. UM, so it's it's
Speaker 1: important to use it to slow it down to these
Speaker 1: microwave amounts. But it means that you can actually create
Speaker 1: what's kind of called like an optical comb frequency, and
Speaker 1: you are able to subdivide those frequencies further and further
Speaker 1: and further, which is what allows us to look at
Speaker 1: smaller and smaller fractions of a second and make more
Speaker 1: and more precise clocks. And we have literally reached the
Speaker 1: limit of my understanding. Okay, okay, but part of my
Speaker 1: understanding of them is more top level than that. You
Speaker 1: just went way deeper than I did. Um but uh
Speaker 1: but but I'm but I'm aware of the idea that
Speaker 1: they're not considered as dependable as atomic clocks, and that's
Speaker 1: why they have not been been used to switch over
Speaker 1: the definition of a second as of yet. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: incredibly complicated machines and there are a lot of potential
Speaker 1: points of failure, so if something goes wrong, the whole
Speaker 1: system doesn't work right, and things go wrong. Technology doesn't
Speaker 1: always work, especially young technology where you're you know, this
Speaker 1: is still relatively young technology where you're trying to develop something.
Speaker 1: And because it's a delicate system and it's very complicated,
Speaker 1: and downtime is a factor. Uh. That means you have
Speaker 1: to actually account for time required to fix the clock,
Speaker 1: which means that like like like like hours or even days. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so while it's offline, you you aren't you don't
Speaker 1: have time, yeah, unless unless you pair to this type
Speaker 1: of system with another type of system, which is what
Speaker 1: essentially is up with this new clock that we mentioned
Speaker 1: at the very top of the podcast years and years ago.
Speaker 1: It seems like it seems like another lifetime Lauren. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this, uh, the story came from a research team
Speaker 1: out of the National a Trology Institute of Germany and
Speaker 1: metrology that's a science of measurement and and and while
Speaker 1: there are branches of this institute all around the world,
Speaker 1: I think there's something so fitting was the Germans, especially
Speaker 1: for time. It's just again it's stereotypical, but you just think,
Speaker 1: like you know, piseyah. So the specific type of clock
Speaker 1: that they were working with is a strontium optical lattice clock.
Speaker 1: By the way, there are research institutes in the United
Speaker 1: States that also are working on this same technology, and
Speaker 1: that's the actual optical clock. The optical lattice is pretty
Speaker 1: much what sounds like. It's an arrangement of lasers that
Speaker 1: are meant to manipulate those atoms of strontium. So again
Speaker 1: back to the James Bond slash mission impossible kind of trap. Uh.
Speaker 1: They use a second device to help account for time
Speaker 1: whenever the lattice clock goes off line, and that is
Speaker 1: a maser. Yeah, it sounds like it, but in fact,
Speaker 1: maser's predate lasers, mazers were Masers were discovered or created
Speaker 1: in the lab before lasers were. They're similar to a laser.
Speaker 1: It is a microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
Speaker 1: So it used to be an acronym. Now it's just
Speaker 1: a word, just like laser. Uh. Masers operate at microwave frequencies,
Speaker 1: which again are not as high as laser frequencies and
Speaker 1: little light frequencies, which means that because their frequencies are
Speaker 1: are are lower. I keep saying slower, but I really
Speaker 1: should just say lower. I know all the physicists out there,
Speaker 1: I've been cringing. I apologize to you guys, but it
Speaker 1: means that because you have a lower frequency, you have
Speaker 1: a lower level of precision. It's kind of like, you
Speaker 1: know again, Like the way I would think of it is,
Speaker 1: imagine that you have um a measuring cup, and uh
Speaker 1: and I you have a measuring cup, I've got a bucket,
Speaker 1: and we each have to say how much water is
Speaker 1: in a pool. And so it's gonna take us a
Speaker 1: long time to figure this out. But you're gonna be
Speaker 1: a lot more precise with your answer than I will,
Speaker 1: although you'll get to your answer quicker than I will, relatively.
Speaker 1: So I didn't say how big the pool was. If
Speaker 1: it's a big enough pool, then both of us have
Speaker 1: just wasted our lives at any rate. The same idea
Speaker 1: with the mazer. With the lower frequency, it can take
Speaker 1: less precise measurements. So what the team did was they
Speaker 1: used the maser to cover for the downtime when the
Speaker 1: optical clock was offline. And the way they did this
Speaker 1: was they then they applied an optical frequency comb to
Speaker 1: divide the maser's measurements into smaller units, similar to that
Speaker 1: to the optical clocks. So while the optical clock was
Speaker 1: still working, they tuned the mazer's frequency so that the
Speaker 1: output most closely resembled that of the optical clock once
Speaker 1: fed through this comb. Yeah. So they're like, well, the mazer,
Speaker 1: while we know it cannot take as precise measurements as
Speaker 1: the optical clock, if we apply this optical comb to it,
Speaker 1: we can kind of fake it, sort of. And as
Speaker 1: long as we have attuned the two together, then we
Speaker 1: can at least depend on this until we can get
Speaker 1: the other one working. Sure. Yeah, and then when the
Speaker 1: optical clock comes back online, then you re a tune everything,
Speaker 1: make sure it's all flowing together and kind of cut
Speaker 1: the difference. Yeah. Yeah, and then you might call people.
Speaker 1: I'm like, hey, I'm going to need that six nanoseconds back. Sorry, sorry, sorry, David,
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to docu six nano seconds for it.
Speaker 1: You took too long for your lunch now. But so so,
Speaker 1: in in this experiment that this team published about recently,
Speaker 1: they ran a test of the system for twenty five days,
Speaker 1: and the optical clock did indeed experience downtime up to
Speaker 1: two days at a go. But at the end of
Speaker 1: the trial their system was just under zero point to
Speaker 1: nanoseconds off. And there's a kind of flashy number that
Speaker 1: the press has latched onto and and it's an extrapolation
Speaker 1: of that, which is that. Okay, So assuming that the
Speaker 1: system wouldn't like degrade over a longer lane of time,
Speaker 1: and assuming that we could have somehow started running it
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the universe as we know it
Speaker 1: a k a. Like fourteen billion years ago, when time
Speaker 1: became a thing. Yes, um it, this clock would have
Speaker 1: lost only about a hundred seconds over those fourteen billions years. So,
Speaker 1: so less than two minutes billion billion, pretty precise. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and and at tom the clocks are pretty good
Speaker 1: at that thing too, like relatively but but they but
Speaker 1: but it beats him out by a factor of like
Speaker 1: a hundred. Yeah. So ultimately, does this mean about the
Speaker 1: future of time keeping, the future of seconds themselves? Well, well, okay,
Speaker 1: the definition of the SI unit isn't just going to
Speaker 1: change overnight. Yeah. In fact, the researchers on this project
Speaker 1: said that it would be at least a decade out
Speaker 1: for that to change, partially because the technology, right, it's
Speaker 1: so young. And we talked about all the fact that
Speaker 1: they're all these different style of optical clocks. They don't
Speaker 1: all use strontium. They may use something else, and we
Speaker 1: haven't figured out yet which one is quote unquote the
Speaker 1: best one to go with, as in, the most reliable,
Speaker 1: the most precise, that has yet to be decided. This
Speaker 1: is still a very early form of research, so it
Speaker 1: may turn out that it will take a decade for
Speaker 1: that to shake out and for us to say, all right,
Speaker 1: this is the optical clock that is best to use
Speaker 1: that we're going with, and this is what a second
Speaker 1: is now. And okay, so so when we do accomplish that,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll have more accurate clocks. Yeah, but practically what
Speaker 1: will that do for us? Lots of stuff. Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, we hear it forward thinking. We always stress
Speaker 1: that pure research ultimately benefits us in ways that we
Speaker 1: cannot anticipate. Oh absolutely, I mean, and you know, like
Speaker 1: like hurrah for the spirit of scientific inquiry and in
Speaker 1: the advancement of physics and all that rad stuff. But
Speaker 1: but okay, like like really, technically, we're not doing all
Speaker 1: of us, all of this for us, right, human beings
Speaker 1: don't miss the nanoseconds that the current you know, gold
Speaker 1: standard atomic clocks are accidentally shaving off. That means that yes,
Speaker 1: in the spirit of Joe being and not being here,
Speaker 1: but in his spirit we're doing this for a robotic overlords. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it turns out like the besides the satellite systems
Speaker 1: that we depend upon, we have a lot of systems
Speaker 1: here on Earth that are really important to coordinate with timekeeping,
Speaker 1: including things like our electric grid. But obviously, if we're
Speaker 1: going to have more and more technology interacting with one another,
Speaker 1: talking to one another, uh, causing things to happen within
Speaker 1: our world, timekeeping becomes incredibly important. Obviously, Like if I
Speaker 1: if I am walking into a room and I want
Speaker 1: a specific outcome to happen through my technology, I want
Speaker 1: that to happen while I'm walking into the room, not
Speaker 1: five minutes after I walked into the room, or five
Speaker 1: minutes after I walked out of the room. Sure, if
Speaker 1: you if you have a GPS system that's controlling your
Speaker 1: autonomous vehicle and another person's autonomous vehicle, you want those
Speaker 1: GPS satellites to be able to hone in on you
Speaker 1: well enough to to to not crash them together. Right,
Speaker 1: If you have a system that is and like an
Speaker 1: external system that's controlling a lot of vehicles, you could
Speaker 1: in theory, reduce traffic to nothing, right, because you could
Speaker 1: you could have the cars moving impossibly close to one
Speaker 1: another incredibly safely. But if your timekeepings off, that suddenly
Speaker 1: becomes a lot of bumping and rubbing on the road.
Speaker 1: Time and distance are still linked and uh or or
Speaker 1: for another example. So back in February, we did an
Speaker 1: episode about how machines run the stock market. Computers are
Speaker 1: very precisely running the stock market these days, making these
Speaker 1: trades at fractions of fractions of a second. The episode
Speaker 1: is called show me the zero zero one zero zero
Speaker 1: one zero zero if you'd like to go look for it.
Speaker 1: I believe that code actually stands for the dollar sign.
Speaker 1: That's adorable. Yeah, I think I actually looked that up.
Speaker 1: That's how much of a dork I am. But but
Speaker 1: so obviously this kind of precision and timekeeping will will
Speaker 1: totally matter to to these computers and to to others
Speaker 1: like them. You know, just think, Jonathan, how many interactions
Speaker 1: and transactions you could complete in a few extra nano
Speaker 1: seconds every day? Man, my Amazon wish list is gonna
Speaker 1: be sick. Yeah, so we're we've been joking around a
Speaker 1: lot and talking kind of about this. This somewhat odd
Speaker 1: idea of a second secon time is such a weird
Speaker 1: thing right to talk about in a objective, definitive way
Speaker 1: when we also are aware that it is relative. It
Speaker 1: makes it really kind of mind bindy to to go
Speaker 1: on about this. And uh, ultimately, if we get to
Speaker 1: a future where people are zooming around the galaxy at
Speaker 1: ridiculous speeds, this kind of precise timekeeping will also be
Speaker 1: important so that we can have any form of communication
Speaker 1: that might be possible as long as they're still you know,
Speaker 1: with reachable distances, um and Yeah, if they're going to
Speaker 1: be the speed of light, then you're you're never going
Speaker 1: to catch up to them, Like the message will always
Speaker 1: be behind them until they stop. And then what will
Speaker 1: happen is they'll travel at the speed of light and
Speaker 1: they'll be like twenty seven light years away and then
Speaker 1: they'll stop and then they'll say you forgot your underwear.
Speaker 1: I'm like, dude, no, I'm just thinking of how have
Speaker 1: that bump in your inbox when you finally right down
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden it's like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: and it's all adds. So this was fun to talk
Speaker 1: about something like this, and we really look forward to
Speaker 1: tackling other interesting topics like this in the future. If
Speaker 1: you guys have any suggestions for future topics, maybe there's
Speaker 1: something you've always wondered. How is that going to be? What?
Speaker 1: What will that be like in the future? Let us know.
Speaker 1: Send us an email. The address is FW thinking at
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