Atomic Clocks

Long before most of you were born there was a special number you could call to get the time here in the USA. It would give you a localized time every 10 seconds. It was considered an authoritative value, but I knew that normal analog clocks drifted a fair amount, and I was fascinated by the Time voice.

There was also a special number to dial that was called Information. When I was about 12, I suddenly thought that’s amazing, you can just call and get information. What I didn’t know at the time was that it only applied to phone numbers.

One day, I called Information and asked them how accurate the time number was and what mechanism was used to deliver it. Incredibly, they connected my preadolescent self to a public relations person at AT&T. That person somehow took me seriously and hooked me up with another party. And that person told me about the cesium atomic clock used to keep track of the time.

Later, I would call Information to find out the acreage occupied by the Los Angeles Zoo, and it was then that they brusquely explained to me that the number was not for general knowledge.

> Today’s best atomic clocks are billions of times more accurate and precise than any other type of clock. If they had been running since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, they would have lost or gained less than a second.

Absolutely incredible, but then confused by the next assertion that is made without context:

> New kinds of clocks may soon open up capabilities that previous generations could only dream about.

What is possible by pushing past that incredibly narrow margin of 1s in 13b years? What dreamy capabilities do we get that we don’t enjoy today?

Edit: I’d assumed they were talking about new approaches to making these clocks more accurate, but I wonder if they’re referring to power and form factors? I.E. an atomic clock the size of a grain of rice: https://www.nist.gov/noac/success-story-chip-scale-atomic-cl...

Not many people know NIST offers a cookbook for perfectly calibrated food

https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/metric-si/metric-kitchen/metric...

What, Exactly, Is a Clock? To understand atomic time, we must first understand something about clocks.

A clock is, at its core, a marriage of two components: a mechanism that oscillates, or ticks with a steady beat, and a device that counts those beats and displays the time

Yeah but more deeply time is a property of the universe that the clock including atomic clocks are tracking. Kant said it is 'schema' i.e. without understanding time we wouldn't even understand causality so it is the purest possible a-priori concept that doesn't rely on sensory input to learn about

This is why I like using my Alphadec system that splits the year into 26 chunks from A-Z <https://github.com/firasd/alphadec> as my working dir; eg. right now the current Alphadec is '2026_P5M7_200286' so my working dir is Documents/work/2026_P. That way there is a folder system automatically imposed on various .js or .py stuff without having to pre-create a taxonomy since 'time is schema'--I can estimate "that ffmpeg project was in Spring so it must be around 2026_F.."

NIST is a great example of a true Public Good.

Also, has anyone else ever used their Randomness Beacon? I once used it to settle an argument in a book club over which book to read next. It's basically a very fancy and high tech coin flip.

https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beac...

Fun fact, two (very expensive) wristwatches have actual atomic timekeeping in them, instead of just receiving a radio time signal: the Bathys Hawaii Cesium 133, and a few different shaped from Hoptroff London.

All released 2013-2015. Not sure what happened then for there to be suddenly two.