So maybe time is like a cesium-fountain clock; it doesn’t run all the “time”. Now, wait a minute. . .or a second. . .or one standard instant. What’re we talkin’ about? Seems the National Institutes of Standards and Technology laboratory in Boulder, CO.US has turned its primary time standard in for a new one
(That URL better confine itself; it’s genuine HTML, not that UBB [unreliably bad-behaved = sometimes works] stuff.)
Exactly what process/goings-on is it that this clock varies 1 s in 20x10^6 yr from? What’re we trying to match up to anyway? Ongoing sidereal/solar/atomic phenomena? Reappearances of the Great Pumpkin?
Ray (No time to ponder; gotta have the answer now, before time changes it. No man is an island in time.)
It seems like since the standard is now atomic, it would vary from the atomic standard. The figure stated for variation is probably based on the statistical probability of the randomness of radioactive decay. The reason I say this is because the readings are made based on the flourescence coming from the cesium ball. If it is travelling through different energy states, the flourescenece is bound to be somewhat random. Obviously not THAT random though
Just my wag…
“Teaching without words and work without doing are understood by very few.”
-Tao Te Ching
There are more than one of these beasties. The trick is to beat the old maxim: “A man with one clock knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure.” The one in France is the “official” international standard for the second. In the United States, the one is Colorado is the new “official” standard. In legal terms, it cannot be “wrong.” Whatever time they say it is, that is what time it is. They kick in a new second, every now and then for astronomic reasons, and when they do, everyone else has to do the same.
What won’t happen for all those millions of years is that the French standard clock, and our standard clocks, all six of the proposed ones, will not be more than a second off. What will really happen is that whenever we get an actual measurable beat off from the one in France, we will change ours by that one beat. (nanosecond, more than likely).
Your handy dandy orbital mind control laser would be off by a foot or so, if you were more than a nanosecond out of step. You could miss a guys whole head, that way. Can’t have that, now can we?
<P ALIGN=“CENTER”>Tris</P>
The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.
– Alexander Jablokov, The Place of No Shadows
