Latest / Stuff You Should Know / Atomic Clocks, Ahoy!

Transcript

Atomic Clocks, Ahoy! · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, we are coming to a town ostensibly near you,
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: so putatively see us.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: That's right, May twenty ninth will be in Boston, really Medford, Massachusetts.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: The next night we're gonna go down to Washington, DC,
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: and then scooch back up to New York City at
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: Town Hall on May thirty first.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you're one of those people who likes
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: to plan way far in advance, then you can go
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: ahead and get tickets for our shows in August. We're
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: gonna start out where Chuck.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: We're gonna be in Chicago August seventh, Minneapolis August eighth,
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: then Indianapolis for the very first time on August ninth,
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: and then we're gonna wrap it up in Durham, North Carolina,
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: and right here in Atlanta.
• 0:35
  Speaker 3: On September fifth and September seventh.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Yep. So you can get all the info you need
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: and all the ticket links you need by going to
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: stuff youshould know dot com and hitting that tour button,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: or you can also go to linktree slash SYSK Live.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: We'll see you guys this year. Welcome to Stuff you
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: the podcast I'm Josh, there's Chuck, and Jerry's back. You
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: don't know if you guys do or not, but Jerry's
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: back because yeah, guest producer Ben was sitting in for
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: a while and now Jerry's back, So everybody, Jerry's back
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: in case you hadn't heard him.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're back from a break. I had the
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: spring break and they're by. You had spring break. You're welcome.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks a lot, Thanks a lot. Where'd you go?
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: One of us gets a kid? We all get a kid.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: I went to Islo Palms again for the first time
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: in like four years.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: Very nice and it was great.
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: It's good to be back. I love that place.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Did you get arrested again?
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: Never got arrested there? Yeah, so I've never been arrested
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: anywhere I know.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: I just wanted to throw everybody off.
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: The casual listeners are like, oh, Chuck got arrested before.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, to get up people, it doesn't exist.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: So I am really excited about this one, Chuck. It'd
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: been on my list for a while. I think I
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: came across a top ten list about like ten weird
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: things about atomic clocks that house stuff works, right, named
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Patrick Kiger wrote, Yeah, and I just had it on
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: the list, but I hadn't really read it enough to
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: know what was going on. And it wasn't until I
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: started digging into the research that I was like, these
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: things are really interesting and the idea of our modern world.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: You know, I soundly frozen caveman lawyer, but it's true.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Like everything from air traffic control to the Internet to
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: basically everything except talking to one another on cans connected
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: by string, you can thank atomic clocks for it just
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: simply wouldn't be possible without the atomic clock.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And by saying that, you're what you're saying is,
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: and we'll dig into this more later, is that the
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: world for everything to operate correctly tech forward world, it
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: has to be synchronized, right, and you can't synchronize something
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: unless everybody agrees on what time it is. And that's
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: all an atomic clock is. It is very simply, and
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: we'll get into the how these things work, which sounds difficult,
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: but it's actually pretty simple.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: Still.
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: It is the most accurate timepiece on planet Earth, and
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: it is a self correcting clock that uses old tech
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: in a way in the form of quartz crystals.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: Oh you gave it away.
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean the first thing we're going to talk
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: about probably.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: Quartz crystals, which is old tech, and that it is
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: constantly being checked and corrected using new tech in the
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: form of the element cum one three.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, very well.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: Put just a clock that sets itself, Yeah, very often
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: and accurately.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because everybody who's ever had any experience with the
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: clock or a watch or something like that knows that
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: it can gain or lose time, it can drift essentially.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: You know what they say, though, what do they say
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: even the worst clock is correct twice a day.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they do say that. Yeah. So you mentioned quartz, right,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: I did. That's a big deal. And what quartz is
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: if you've ever I had no idea what quartz was
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: in a watch or a clock. I just had seen quartz,
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: and you know, courts, it was like decades before I
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: realized that wasn't a brand. That they were saying, hey,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: there's quarts inside, and what they're doing is boasting about
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: how reliable their clock is. Because when we used to
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: we used to use things like mechanical stuff like springs
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: that you would whine, that would power a bunch of gears,
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: and that would kind of gears. Yeah, the movement of
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: the gears would tick off seconds.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: Right, how to gears work though.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Oh, we'll get into that in different episode. Right, Or
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: you had a pendulum tickt off time something like that.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: And then when we move to Quurtz, what quartz does
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: is it takes off time as well, because we figured
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: out at some I don't know who tried this first,
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: but if you apply an electrical current to courts, you
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: mechanically like disfigure it. It called the Piezzo electric effect.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: And after you I guess as a result of that
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: that contortion, it emits energy. It's like it's like it's
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: a way of saying uncle. And when it emits energy,
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: it emits it at a really reliable frequency. And we
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: figured out how to use that reliable frequency to tell time.
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: And it's pretty pretty nuts how complicated clocks are, and
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: just how it kind of to me falls in line
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: with that Arthurs cy Clark quote that any sufficiently advanced
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: technology will be indistinguishable from magic. I think applying electricity
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: to quartz to keep time is right up there with
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: that kind the thing.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you mentioned it's a Pizzo electric material, and you know,
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: we apply electricity to it just to affect it like
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: you could. You could bend chords or smack it or
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: flick it with your finger or something, any kind of
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: mechanical stress on it, and it would do the same thing,
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: and it would produce an electrical charge that's going to
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: come out in pulses. And what those pulses do is they,
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: in the terms of a clock or a watch, is
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: they mimic the swinging of that pendulum. But in this case,
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: like a pendulum ideally swings it once per second, in
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: this case it's thirty two thousand, seven hundred and sixty
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: eight pulses per second that that quartz crystal is emitting.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: And you talked about whacking it or something. It looks
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: like if you look at like the quartz they use,
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: it looks like a little tiny tuning fork.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Oh Nito, I hadn't seen that.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just a little itty bitty tiny tuning fork.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: And just like you would whack a tuning fork, and
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: it would, you know, whatever a tuning fork does, because
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: that's not what this is about. But that quurch does
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: the same thing. And we'll come back to that. Thirty
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: two thousand and seven hundred and sixty eight pulses per
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: second a few times, because the whole idea with the
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: development and as we get into history here of the
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: atomic clock is the more little pulses or ticks that
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: you have, the more accurate within a second of time,
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: the more accurate a clock is going to be. And
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: the development of the atomic clock has always been about
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: just making that number as large as possible. And I
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: guess we shouldn't reveal where we're at now, but it's
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: in the matter of billions.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Well, so if you start from the say like an
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: old grandfather clock, as a pendulum swings from one side
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: to the other, that's a second, right, and we'll call
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: that a tick. Ticks off a second by swinging from
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: one side to the other. And if that pendulum is
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: off just a little bit, say by a tenth of
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: a second, right every ten seconds, it's going to lose
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: a second, right because it has far fewer things to
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: tick off. It has one tick per second, and like
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: you were kind of hinting at, with crystals, you have
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: thirty two thousand plus ticks per second. So if it
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: misses one tick out of like, what if it misses
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: a tenth of the ticks, that's far far fewer in
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: total than it is to that one tick or that
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: tenth of a tick that the pendulum is missing. And
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: so the more accurate the clock is, the more it's
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: what's called stable. And that's the goal of super precise clocks. Stability,
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: which is it's going to measure a second exactly the
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: same now as it will ten thousand years from now.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: That's stability, and that's the goal, and that's why we've
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: started to turn to things like the atom, which if
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: we can figure out how to measure the atom accurately,
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: it's it's going to release x number of ticks every
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: time anywhere in the universe if we can measure it
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: when it's excited. And that's kind of where we're at
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: with atomic clocks.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And if you're wondering, you know, in the terms
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: of analog technology, with watches and clocks, they fall out
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: of whack for a number of reasons because mainly because
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: it's analog technology. Like a spring gets weaker over time,
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: gears can come out of balance. Even when it comes
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: to crystals, like when they got the quartz crystal involved,
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: that was pretty good, like thirty two thousand and seven
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: sixty eight pulses per second, Like that's not too bad
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: at all, but they can. Quarts can gunkump a little
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: bit because it's a naturally occurring thing, and we'll talk
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: about where you find that in a minute. And temperature,
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: atmospheric pressure, all of these things can throw even quarts
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: out of whack because it operates really well, you know,
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: basically at room temperature. But once you start applying you know,
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: really cold like a watch in the really really cold weather,
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: an analog watch are really really hot weather, is it
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: going to be as accurate? So all of these things again,
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: for many many, many hundreds of years, like all this
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: stuff was fine because they just needed to tell time
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: and get it pretty darn close, and that was good enough.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: But when we started going into space, when we started
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: launching satellites, certainly when the Internet came online, we started
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: using GPS to do things like oh a get you places,
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: b bomb unfortunately bomb hopefully the right place from a
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: satellite communication in a war being off a little bit
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: can cost human lives and lose a lot of money
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: in other cases. So accuracy and that stability was a
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: really really important goal to reach.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I found a really good kind of comparison of
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: you know why, that's so important that accuracy. So like
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: with quartz clock or a watch, it might lose fifteen
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: seconds over thirty days, which is not bad if you're
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: running a train schedule, a court swatch will do just fine, right,
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: But if you're trying to like say, land a lunar
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: lander on the moon, if you're off by something like
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: a millisecond, you might overshoot the moon by like one
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: hundred and two hundred miles three hundred or so kilometers
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: just by a millisecond. And a lander needs to be
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: accurate within like one hundred meters, so a millisecond off
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: in your calculations can make you miss your your spot
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: by like three thousand times. That's not good at all.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: So that's why we need this kind of accurate stuff.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: And there's all tons of applications, like we'll talk about
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: it later, but it just kind of goes to show
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: like just how vital time is when you start using
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: it as a factor in really heavy formulas, which are
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: the kind of formulas they used to land landers on
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: the moon. The heaviest.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I got one more for you. A microsecond, even
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: just a microsecond. An error in the order of a
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: microsecond can be a three hundred meter or about three
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: hundred and twenty something yards difference, so that's still a lot.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure, So again you need precision, and people have
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: been working for quite a while now to make clocks
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: as precise as possible. Do you want to like take
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: a break and then start talking about the history of
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: the atomic clock?
• 12:28
  Speaker 3: I think so.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: I think that was I mean, maybe one of our
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: best setups ever between you and me. I don't want
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: to get this out on the air, but okay, all right,
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: this is just us talking.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: We'll edit that out.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: All right, we'll edit that out. But I think we're
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: on the right track.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Okay, well, we'll be right back everybody. So we have
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: a physics, very famous physics professor named Isidor Rabbi who
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: turned down the job of being Oppenheimer's like right hand
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: man at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project and instead
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: of one often to his own thing. And one of
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: the things he developed is he discovered nuclear magnetic resonance,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: and he figured out that's used in like the Wonder machine,
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: the MRI, that's how it does its thing. He figured
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: out how to train that into or how to use
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: it to great effect in what's called an atomic beam
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: magnetic resonance, which essentially is a way to trap and
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: push around and excite atoms that you want to specifically
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: mess with. That's that's maybe the ten thousand feet version
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: of what atomic beam magnetic resonance is.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and when we say we're going to say things
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: like exciting atoms, that just means they're moving around.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So just I guess we could toss it out
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: real quick now. And Adam has a ground state which
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: is its resting state and an excited state, and it
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: can have multiple excited states, but it's either resting or
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: in some sort of excited state or other. Right, So
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Rabbi was like, hey, this nuclear beam, I have a
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: feeling you guys could could make an atomic clock out
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: of it. And everybody said, you guys, why don't you
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: make it? And he said, you go make it. I
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: he can, dare you was his famous quote.
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: You do it, No, you do it.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: So somebody went off and did it. Yeah. I think
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: within four years the National Bureau of Standards which is
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, they said
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: we've got this. We did it. Rabbi and He's like,
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: what are you talking about? He had terrible forgetfulness.
• 14:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they said, we built the first atomic clock, and
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: this is the earliest version. Used ammonia as the molecule
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: and the source of the vibrations, so there were reason
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: like copper piping to heat it up and shoot it out.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: It was compared to what we have today, very rudimentary.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: But it worked pretty well as approofed of concept, as in, hey,
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: we can do this.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: But it was a little bit off.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: I think it was about a second every four months,
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: better than quartz, but still not as good as we
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: needed to get to. But again, it proved conceptually that
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: an atomic clock was a thing that works better.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: Yes, for sure. But what's strange about ammonia is it
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: has a lower frequency, so there's less ticks per second
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: than the quartz crystal. Does it as like twenty three
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: thousand ticks per second or twenty and seventy hertz, right,
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: But like you said, they figured out that, yes, you
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: can use an atom to keep track of time. But
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: they're like, we got to find something better than that.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Let's try seasium. And in nineteen one, yeah exactly, I
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: could not find anywhere why they decided on seasium. I
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: know it's like neutral and maybe it's like it only
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: maybe because it only does have two states, either ground
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: or excited. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's a
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: really weird element, and it's difficult to work with, especially
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: at like room temperature, because it can just suddenly catch
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: fire if it wants to.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: Well, I saw why they used it.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: You want to know, Well, all of this stuff has
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: to deal with oscillation, which is basically, whether it's a
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: pendulum swinging or that spring moving the gears, oscillation just
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: means something that's moving back and forth at a regular rate.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: And it turns out that ccium one thirty three and
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: when something is oscillating, and when you're speaking of like
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: a clock or a timepiece, that's called a frequency reference,
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: like you're literally referencing a frequency that needs to be steady.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: And ccium one thirty three, they found, just was the
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: most consistent frequency reference that they could find in nature.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: And that was important because using something natural meant that
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: humans all of a sudden were taken out of the
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: equation for the first time, which was a breakthrough because
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: it's like, this stuff is consistent till the cows come
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: home and human hands aren't making it.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: So no, the only thing that humans have to do
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: is to figure out how to excite it, and once
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: you get it excited, it's going to do the same
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: thing every time, like I said, anywhere in the universe. Yeah,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: and then how to measure it. And those are like
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: the advances in atomic clocks. Figuring out how to more
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: accurately measure caesium atoms once you get them excited. That's
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: kind of like the advance once they figured out how
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: to excite seaesium and then how to measure it. They
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: had the first atomic clock all the way back in
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two. The thing is is they started kind
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: of advancing by leaps and bounds because with caesium, I think,
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: do you want to go ahead and reveal like how
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: many ticks caesium gives off every second?
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: I guess we should, huh, I think you should take
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: it man, all.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: Right, So it was thirty two thousand and chain for quartz,
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: or that pulse caesium one thirty three oscillates at nine billion,
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: one hundred and ninety two million, six hundred and thirty
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: one thousand and seven hundred and seventy right, that's I
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: think we would all agree that's quite a jump from
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: thirty two thousand and change.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: It is. And like you said, oscillate is something that
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: is just moving back and forth. It can also oscillate
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: up and down. And if something oscillates up and down,
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: what you're talking about is a wave. And if you
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: put a bunch of waves together, you have a frequency,
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: right if you if you have if you have a
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: point in space that you are detecting a wave passing,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: and you count how many pass in one second, you're
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: tracking the frequency of that wavelength, right, which I think
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: in that sense as a hurts. Whatever happens in a
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: second is a hurtz. That's the that's the old slogan.
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: And so if you were if you could see the
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: waves coming off of a caesium atom as it returns
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: back to its ground state, it got really excited and
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: it shoots off a photon, and the photon itself has
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: waves where if you could, if you could just stand
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: still and watch it pass and count the waves, you
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: would count nine billion, one hundred and ninety two million,
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: six hundred and thirty one, seven hundred and seventy waves
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: passed by you in exactly one second, and it became
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: so clear that you could literally set your watch to
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: this kind of thing if you could figure out how
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: to measure it. That back in nineteen sixty seven, the
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: international community said, let's just attach the second to the
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: caesium atom. Yeah, and the caesium Adam said, I better
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: get some money for this.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, let's literally redefine what a second means based
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: on this caesium one thirty three. Prior to that, it
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: was based on like, you know, the sun coming up
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: and going down. It was a solar day, so it
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: was one eighty six thousand and four hundred thousandth man,
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: really hard to keep my head around. One over eighty
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: six four hundred is the average length of a solar day,
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: just that little fraction. So they said, let's just redefine it,
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: and I think we should go through a little bit
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: sort of the jumps that they made. Yeah, I agree,
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: because this is all just kind of like, I mean,
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: who cares about this? What people really want to know
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: is how much more accurate was this stuff in nineteen
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: fifty nine. I believe the nineteen fifty five was the
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: first season base clock and then in nineteen fifty nine
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: they had an error rate of one second per two
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: thousand years. Five years later it was second every six
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: thousand years.
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: It could lose or.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Gain a second. Let me say, what's the next one
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: nineteen ninety nine. Well, let's go to the mid seventies. First, Yeah,
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: it was one second every three hundred thousand years, and
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: then finally in nineteen ninety nine when they debuted the
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: caesium fountain, which that's still what they're using today, right.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's kind of the general state of the art,
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: although they're just still looking into new stuff too.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: How much better do you need to get it? Though?
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: They're getting it pretty good.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: So nineteen ninety nine it became you could lose a
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: second every twenty million years, and then by twenty thirteen
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: they said we can actually go back in time and
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: say that using this method, we have not lost a
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: second since the Big Bang.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Right. So that last one you mentioned is a strontium
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: lattice clock, which is again we just talked about. Once
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: we figure out how to measure the vibration of an
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: atom once it's excited and returns to its ground state,
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: it's just a question of becoming better and better at
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: measuring it. And so they figured out that if you
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: hold strontium atoms in laser beams form a lattice, you
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: can basically hold them in place and measure them much
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: more accurately. And so that's what represented that crazy amazing leap.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: And I was trying to figure out, like, how can
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: they say, like, this thing would not have lost a
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: second since the beginning of the universe. How can you
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: possibly do that? It really is, But they know how
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: to back it up. So what they do is they'll
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: compare the output of one stronium clock to another stronium clock,
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: and the difference, the biggest difference between the two. They'll
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: take that and say that that's the discrepancy, right, And
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: because these things vibrate at such crazy huge numbers per second,
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: that the like the loss of like one or two
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: waves over a second, it just adds up to these
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: crazy huge numbers. So it lost one wave essentially for
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: every ten to the tenth power waves, which is like
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: I think ten billion waves, right. So when you start
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: adding that up to the number of seconds in a day,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: in a year, in a century, you suddenly realize like, Okay,
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: this thing is not going to lose a second for
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: you know, fifteen billion years. That's how they do that.
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: Amazing math is how they do it.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: I should say, let's give matho its due for once.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, all the maths as they say in England for sure.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: So we're going to explain how this works now. Kind
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: of the remarkable surprise of it all is that these
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: things and I guess it's not much of a surprise
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: because I mentioned it at the very beginning, it could
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: have been, but they still use quartz as part of
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: this system. It's just it's a feedback loop that starts
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: with a quartz crystal and ends up with the quartz crystal,
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: and in between this science voodoo happens. That just is
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: all about self correcting as it feeds back into that
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: quartz crystal to be you know, shot back out again
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: in the form of microwaves.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Yes, And I'm glad that you really kind of stepped
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: up and took charge here, because when we're researching, we'll
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: send like you know, especially day of stuff. We'll send
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: just like little last minute details or maybe better explanations
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: of something that we have when we're researching, and Chuck
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: stepped up and was like, okay, let's not over explain this.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: This is actually kind of a simple thing in concept,
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: and you rescue me from sheer madness.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: It is our thing though.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: I had looked into the abyss and found atomic clocks
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: just staring back at me, and it was something that
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: really you really rescued me from it, and I appreciate it.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: I want to say hats off to you.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: Well, thanks, but we're not done. Oh God, like, there's
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: still a chance to over explain this into confusion.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Well, then allow me to try that, all.
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: Right, take it away, because it's all about this outermost electron, right.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so with caesium, I guess then the reason
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: they selected caesium is because it has fifty five electrons.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: Fifty four of them are so tightly locked in orbit
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: around the nucleus that they basically don't get excited. Yeah,
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: that fifty fifth outer most electron, though, it gets excited
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: pretty easy, right, But it only gets excited when it's
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: exposed to frequent sea of electromagnetic radiations at specifically nine billion,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: one hundred ninety two million, six hundred and thirty one
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: and seven hundred and seventy cycles or hurtz.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: If you offered ice cream.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: It gets kind of excited. Sure, yeah, but it may
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: not fall out of its ground state. It depends. Is
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: it Jenny's ice cream? Is it that like butter cake?
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: Gooey butter cake? It's gonna get excited from that one.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: Is it just you know some dippy old you know
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Briars that's been in for several months. Yeah, there's no
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: shade on briars. But if it sits there for a
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: few months, it's kind of form ice crystals. Nobody, even
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: the caesium Adam's not going to get excited by this.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, what was it in?
• 25:38
  Speaker 4: Uh?
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: Did you see the Alfred Brooks movie Mother.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Albert Brooks?
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: And yes, what I say?
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: I think you said Alfred Brooks and I think that's
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: his butler.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: Well no, but well now that we're off on this track,
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: you know their original name was Einstein. Albert Einstein was
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: his name? No, Albert Brooks's name, yes, because his brother
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: was super Dave Osborne Bob Einstein.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, yes, I forgot about it.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: Obviously changed his name, but yeah, his his movie Mother
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: with a great Debbie Reynolds.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Kerrie Fisher's mom.
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: That's right, boy, we're just all over the place.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: Yep, there was a very funny joke about the ice
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: crystals on the ice.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: Cream, and I can't remember what she called it, but
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: something like.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: A protective barrier or something that it forms like to
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: really preserve the ice cream underneath that is.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: So that's a good one. I feel bad for Fleischmann
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: from Northern Exposure because he has to play such a
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: jerk and he does it so well.
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: I saw an episode of that, a couple of episodes
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: on our last tour.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: Actually, you know, Chuck, I think have you seen the
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: whole series?
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: I mean I saw it back when I was a
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: huge Northern fan, but then watched a couple I watched
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: the first two EPs when we were I was in
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: the hotel in one of our towns.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: And how did it hold up?
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: You know, it held up pretty good for a show
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: of that era.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, great, fantastic. Did you look glad to hear that? Yeah?
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: I loved it. I was gonna say I think that
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: the last episode was one of the best last episodes
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: of any show ever. I don't remember it or no, okay, sorry,
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: not last episode. Fleischman's last episode, oh oh, when.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: He goes back to New York Okay, I don't remember.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: Did he leave in the show continued, Yeah, very little,
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: while I don't remember this guy. When Steve Carell left
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: the office, I was done.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, his last Uh. There was some moments of brilliance
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: in there in the office after Corell left, but it
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: wasn't Yeah, it wasn't reliably great every single episode. Yeah,
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: and they got whackier and whackier as time went on.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: But that happens, especially when a showrunner leaves too.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: How do we get sidetracked? I'm talking about the ice talking.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: About yeah, mother. And by the way, I just wanted
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: to give a shout out to the Alfred Brooks a
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: movie Defending Your Life so great, far and away his
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: best movie, if you ask me.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: There's a really good documentary on him that's out now
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: that Rob Reiner did in case you're interested.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: Okay, cool, all right, So we're back to seesium and
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: I was saying that it gets excited at that same
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: frequency that it emits a photon at, right, That's what
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: it takes. And so what they figured out is that
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: you can figure you can find out if your quartz,
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: crystal oscillat or the thing that you're using to keep
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: time with it's super reliable. But again it gets subject
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: to frequency drift here or there. But if you can
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: find out how far off or whether it's keeping reliable
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: time by comparing it to the excitement of a caesium atom.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: If the quartz crystal is putting out the right frequency,
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: the caesium atom will become excited and it will shoot
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: off a photon. And if enough of them do that
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: in this atomic clock, this gas chamber essentially that they have,
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: then you know that your quartz crystal is keeping the
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: right time because it's emitting the right number of pulses itself.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: The thing is chuck And this is where the madness lies.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: For me. I don't understand how they take thirty two
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: thousand and change hurts coming from the Qurtz crystal and
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: translate that into nine billion and change hurts that excites
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: the caesium atam. That's what I don't get. Do you
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: get that?
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: Well?
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: The way I understood it is that those two things
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: are working independently, Like the caesium is doing its thing
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: at nine billion plus hurts, okay, just to get a
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: more accurate measurement, and then it's sending that correction via
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: another electronic signal. I think it goes into what's called
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: the detector. That's to me where the magic is, because
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: I watch a bunch of videos, even kids science videos,
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: and it just says it goes into the detector, yeah,
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: and then back out feeding into the courts.
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: Again.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: I don't know what happens in that detector. I mean
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: it's detecting.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I think they're actually tracking the photons. It's one
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: of the beauties of it. And I think that's why
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: they kept courts crystal technology run is because it releases
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: radio waves and we can read those really easily, so
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: that has that's one reason they kept quts around. It
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: keeps good time and we understand it really well. But
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: so this is but this is where I'm thrown off, Like,
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: are they comparing the number of ticks that the courtz
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: is giving off to the number of ticks that the
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: caesium atom is given off and that's the same time
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: span and the If the two match, then you know
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: the Courts is still keeping good time. If it's off
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: a little bit, then you know how much to adjust it,
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: because that caesium atom is not going to release any
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: more waves than that number. It's just not there's never
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: going to be seven hundred and seventy one. There's never
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: going to be seven hundred and sixty nine. It's always
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: going to be that nine billion number. So I guess
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: if you compare how many of the crystal, which can
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: have more or less over time depending on how well
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: it's functioning, If you compare those two, then you know
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: that your courtz clock is keeping fully act. You're at time?
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: Is that what it is?
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: I think that's the deal and all that it does
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: once it reads once those atoms are like, no, you're
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: actually off a little bit. I think it just tweaks
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: that original electric current in the feedback loop feeding back
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: into the courts.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: Right, it punishes right chords crystal in the form of bank.
• 31:21
  Speaker 4: No.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: No, it's like that that one guy who's being tested
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: for ESP at the beginning of Ghostbut no, not again.
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: I mean, I think I think that's I think that's it. Great,
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: good night.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about the second a little more because
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: I think we kind of jump past and I think
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: it's worth including the actual definition because it's so great.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what is it now? Since the official change?
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is what they changed to in nineteen
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: sixty seven the second. They're talking about the second. Every
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: everybody who walks around is like, yeah, there's sixty seconds
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: in a minute. This is the international definition of what
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: a second is. It's the duration of nine billion, one
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: hundred and ninety two million, six hundred and thirty one thousand,
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: seven hundred and seventy periods of the radiation corresponding to
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: state of the caesium one thirty three atom. By the way, everybody,
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: this definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: a temperature of zero calvin.
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: Wow, so yeah, but you're like, okay, that that doesn't
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: really make any sense. But now that you understand how
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: atomic clocks are work, it does make sense. They're saying,
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: if you have something that is timed to this, you
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: have a second. That's a second, right there. Everybody's going
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: to be on the same measure. That's why it's the
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: international standard. Everyone is on the same measure, and the
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: caesium atom is never going to give out more or
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: less of those waves when it's excited.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and like you said, you know the reason. One
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: of the reasons that quarts was used is because we
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: had worked with it up until that point. We understood it.
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: A lot of the tech was built around it. We've
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: known how to work with it and repair things using it.
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: So like, they.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: Didn't want to reinvent the wheel here, they just wanted
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: to make that quartz run more perfectly. And it turned
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: out it was, you know, sitting around in ore deposits
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: and where what Maine and South Dakota.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and polar stasium comes from. It's pretty rare.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And the other thing that strikes me about this
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: Chuck too, was when we adopted that second in nineteen
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: sixty seven and removed our seconds from the solar day
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: because it's so inaccurate.
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: Cluegi.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Really, we actually became better at tracking the solar day
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: when we turned our attention to tracking the atom for
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: use as a benchmark for time rather than the solar day.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: I think that's pretty neat and ironic.
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they've calculated that too, right, Like, because
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: now we have what's called International Atomic Time t AI.
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: It's one of those backwards French things, Yeah.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: Backwards French things, but now we can actually track using
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: universal time and against the Earth's rotation, and you know,
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: the fact that we're off because you know, things can
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: slow the Earth down, space, dust, scan, solar winds, atmospheric resistance,
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: the moon, you know, and gravity tugging on the Earth.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: So they can say now that UTC coordinated Universal Time
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: is thirty seconds behind the TAI.
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: Right, which is pretty pretty cool to be able to
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: know that.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like they're keeping better track of the spin
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: of the Earth than the spin of the Earth is. Yeah,
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: it's like it's crazy, Like they figured out that the
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: Earth is slowing down by about two milliseconds each day.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: Could not have done that when you're pinning the second
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: to one eighty six four hundredth of a solar day.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: You need atomic clocks to measure stuff like that. So
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: I just think that's just fantastically neat. And they've done
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: so many other stuff. There's so many other things with
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: us already too. I say we take a break and
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: we come back and talk about some of the applications
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: for timekeeping in an ultra precise way.
• 35:20
  Speaker 4: Let's do it. So.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: Atomic clocks were a huge leap forward, but they were
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: very big at first. Obviously, with all kinds of tech
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: like this, it just gets smaller and smaller. I think
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: about twenty years ago they built an atomic clock that
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: could be put upon a microprocessor. It's crazy, totally crazy,
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: And it's important to point out here that there are
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: a little more than four hundred atomic clocks all over
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: the world and more than seventy labs operating these clocks.
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: But you still need, like you know, one ring to
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: rule them all. You need one clock to tell all
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: the clocks what.
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: Time it is.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: So the International Bureau waits and Measures averages all these
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: atomic clocks that are operating in the world. It gives
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: better weight to the ones that are really accurate. So
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: if you've got a gold star because your atomic clock
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: in your lab is super accurate, you're going to be
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: more heavily weighted.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: If there's a lot of known pot users in your lab,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: they're not going to wait it as heavily.
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: So well, ironically we'll see here in a minute. It
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: comes from Colorado, but it is. Then they're like, all right,
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: this is the real time for the entire world, and
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: then they message that out as what I mentioned earlier,
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: International atomic time and here in the United States, or
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: I guess in all of North America that is broadcast
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: out from a radio station in Fort Collins, Colorado, WWVB
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: that all American clocks sink to.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there all control clocks exactly. Yeah. So if you
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: have an atomic watch or an atomic alarm clock or
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: something at your house, it's actually passively picking up those
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: radio waves from WWVB, and those radio waves are telling
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: the clock what time it is. So it's keeping accurate
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: time because it's getting the information from from radio WWVB,
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: Radio Free Europe.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's the time that they're like, all right,
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: this is what time it is on the internet, and
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: that's what time all your trains are gonna run and
• 37:45
  Speaker 2: your planes are gonna take off in land. Yeah, although
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: those are always gonna be late. But you know, if
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: we're operating in space, if we're using GPS, and you
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: can explain the thing you found on GPS because that
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: was pretty cool, But all of it is set to
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: that that agreed upon average of all those atomic clocks.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And some people have their own like timekeeping stuff
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: like if you if you have an iPhone or Android
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: or something like that, whoever is serving that that phone
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: has their own time servers, but their time servers are
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: still if you trace it back far enough. Some they're
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: getting their information from the atomic clocks that are being
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: maintained at least in the US by the National Institutes
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: of Standard and Technology. And then we also have to
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: give a shout out to the US Naval Observatory. They
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: started at first, and they still maintain their own set
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: of atomic clocks, and they are the official timekeeper for
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: the Department of Defense. But they're also the ones that
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: you can call to get the accurate time. And in
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: the United States you can call two two seven six
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: two one four oh one, and you will hear the
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: voice of a man from the seventies who died in
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: the nineties who's still telling you what time it is.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: He apparently spent several days. Fred Goldsmith, I think.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: What's that number again?
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: Two oh two seven six two fourteen oh one.
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: All right, I'm typing that into my phone because I
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: had a weird urge about two months ago to call
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: time like we did when we were kids. You could
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: call and get time and weather. You're still chances yep,
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: all right, I'm glad to know that's the thing, because
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: I'm gonna I'm gonna do it from the phone that
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: I know has all that information on it so so.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was reading like an AARP article on appropriately enough,
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: and I think they already get the name is Fred
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: Fred Goldsmith, right, Uh yeah, that's where I get a
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: lot of this information.
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: No, no, no, but are you getting mailers yet?
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: Uh? No, I found it on the internet.
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: Okay, just way that you get your first mailer.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: He apparently recorded every possible time it could be, including seconds,
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: over the course of several days, and they still use
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: these recordings to tell you what time it is.
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: Amazing.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: One of the other amazing things I saw was like
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: they just expected this to kind of go away once
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: smartphones became so quit, people just didn't need it anymore.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: Your phone is automatically communicating with your server, the time
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: server for your phone company. Nope. In two thousand and nine,
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: they actually started to see an increase in calls. So
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: now people called more than they did in the early
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: two thousands.
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: Today, you tell me movie phone is still around, I'm
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: gonna just quit my job and do nothing but call
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: those numbers all day.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: You remember when Kramer figured out that yeah or no,
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: did did people think he had the movie phone numbers?
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: So he started thinking being the movie phone.
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And I think that's what happened.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: And when he didn't know the answers like they would
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: be punching in the numbers, he would say, why don't
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: you just tell me the movie?
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: That's right?
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: Oh godness good classic rate A r oh Man.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: I watched the Puffy Pirates shirt episode the other day
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: and it was and it still holds up. Yeah.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: All right, so we promised talk of GPS. I didn't
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: have time to dig into what you sent. So you've
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: got it together enough. Can you explain how GPS works?
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah? So you mentioned that some atomic clocks can be
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: fit under microchips. Now and you can find those microchips
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: and board satellites that orbit space, and we have satellites
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: that are dedicated to GPS Global Positioning System. Right, I
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: actually found this. I got to give a shout out
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: to Rpeds r car, who is just some random person on.
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: Cora who we hope got it right.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, as long as they are not so masterful at
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: mashing facts up and into you know, into lies essentially,
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: but just covering it up perfectly, I'm pretty sure this
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: guy got it right. But essentially what they do is
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: you're if you're like, say you're using ways or something
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: which I do use shout out to ways to love it.
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: It has an on board GPS receiver somewhere. I don't
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: know if it's in the waste server or something like that.
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's using your phones. It's probably using your phone.
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: And what it's doing is it's receiving a signal from
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: the GPS satellite saying here's a signal of some GPS info,
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: but also here's a timestamp that came from my own
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: atomic clocks that I have on board this satellite. Right,
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: And so your GPS receiver gets it, calculates how using
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: the speed of light as part of the formula, how
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: long it took for you to get that, and then
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: it does it again with another satellite and another satellite,
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: usually two or three, and based on all of the
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: differences between how long it took for those satellites to
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: send you that information, it can tell you within I
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: think one hundred ten feet or ten meters I think,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: exactly where you are on planet Earth because it triangulates
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: your location. And that's all thanks to atomic clocks. It
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: wouldn't be possible to do that without atomic clocks.
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So I mean, if you're geocaching, next time you
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: get that Santana record out of the GOK. Thank an
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: atomic clock. Thanks caesium one thirty three.
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: Thank the good people of Maine.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: And uh north through South Dakota one of them.
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: I think it's South Dakota.
• 43:12
  Speaker 4: Uh.
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: Was that a callback to like a two thousand and
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: nine episode? Is that what we said you could find
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: in the geo cash things? Man?
• 43:22
  Speaker 3: For a little while.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: I think apparently for a little while, some people were
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: stuff you should know. Listeners were putting Santana tapes and CDs.
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: It's awesome in geocacius. But I'm sure that's run its course.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe not, who knows. I'll bet there's some retro
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: geocashers that are like, I got the Santana thing going on.
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I was saying, geocacias, that's not work.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: I've heard people say that before, although maybe it was
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: you from the episode people. Yeah, what else can you
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: do with the stuff, chuck?
• 43:52
  Speaker 4: Uh?
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: I mean I think that's a pretty good summation.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: Well, let me add let me add one more thing.
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: You it's been used in physics experiments to its vital
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: and physics experience because you're tracking, like say, the decay
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: of particles and atom smashers, and that happened so fast
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: that you couldn't do it without atomic clocks because they're
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: tracking things in the billions of a second. Right, pretty
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: good stuff. It's also been used more than once to
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: prove Einstein's theory of relativity that there's gravitational time dilation
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: depending on the effects of gravity on you and how
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: fast you're traveling, as in relation to the speed of light,
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: time's either going to move faster or slower for you,
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: And so people have taken atomic clocks and put them
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: at different elevations. There was a very famous by much
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: no I think thirty centimeters for one experiment, and it
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: produced differences in time time dilation. But there was a
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: really famous experiment called the half lee Keating experiment in
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one where they put some atomic clocks on
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: airliners and just flew around the world and then compared
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: them when they got back to the clocks back on Earth,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: and there was a clear distinction between time. It's very
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: very slight, but it's enough to prove that, yes, Einstein's
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: theory of gravitational time dilation is correct.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like that old thing that you will age faster
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: living in the mountains than at sea level.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is true.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: But I think what they found out was if you'd
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: live in the mountains, it'd be about ninety billions of
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: a second. Yeah, less life over a seventy nine year lifetime.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: So it's like, why bother even telling us that?
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: Exactly?
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: There's one other thing too, so we mentioned, oh we
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: didn't mention. I'm sorry I left this out. Those GPS
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: atomic clocks that they have on board, very very precise.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: They still get updates twice a day from back here
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: on Earth from those international timekeepers. Yeah, just to make
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: sure that the frequency drift hasn't taken over too much.
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: It just updates them. Right, You can't do that the
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: further you get out from space. I mean, these satellites
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: are only tens or dozens of miles above us. Right.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: As we get further and further out into space, it
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: becomes harder and harder to communicate with Earth and to
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: get like updates about what time it is. So they're
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: looking to build ultra precise atomic clocks that can go
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: out in space on board spacecrafts that can keep their
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: own time. They don't need any updating from back here
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: on Earth. They're going to lose so little time over
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: such a long period of time that they will essentially
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: stay calibrated to the time back on Earth for incredibly
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: long periods of time through incredibly long distances out into space.
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: Why haven't they done that yet, that was my sort
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: of question.
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: Well, they have harder they have.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: NASA launched the Deep Space Atomic Clock in twenty nineteen,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: which is like a test I apparently is going very well.
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I was about to say, why don't they
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: just throw one of those puppies aboard the spacecraft?
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: But they but they did, and they they're using mercury
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: ions instead of caesium atoms or astronium. It is because
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: so one of the things these atoms, when you have
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: them in like a cloud chamber or whatever, they can
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: rub up basically against the sides of the chamber and
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: it's gonna mess with them a little bit, it's gonna
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: mess with your measurements. Some With an ieon, you can
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: keep it trapped in an electromagnetic field. It's not gonna
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: mess with anything. It's not gonna rub up against anything.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: And so that's how it's it stays so reliable. How
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: it's your Your measurements are going to stay reliable for
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: a very long time because they're not interacting with you know,
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: they're not bumping up against anything.
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they're not slam dancing.
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: They're doing the billy idol. They're dancing with theirselves.
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: Speaking of slam dancing, And I went to Circle Jerks
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: and Descendants last week and it was amazing. And there
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: are people, there's a there's a pit for sure in
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: a long time.
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: Did you look down and you me was body serving
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: across the crowd.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: No, but she was into it. She was there for
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: the Descendants. I was there for the Circle Jerks. But
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: both shows were very good. And a fan came up
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: and said, hi, at.
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: The show, I think I saw an email or something.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, she emailed was like, I'm sorry if it
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: was like awkward or weird, And it wasn't awkward or
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: weird at all.
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sure it was wonderful.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: But it was a very good show. And if you
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: have a chance to see Descendants in Circle Jerks and
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: you like punk, go see it because it's awesome. It's
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: very good.
• 48:29
  Speaker 3: Still at it. I love it.
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah. If you want to know anything more about atomic clocks,
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: you can find a whole rabbit hole to go down.
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: See if you can escape madness yourself. In the meantime,
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: it's time for listener mail.
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: This is one that we've tried to get on recently.
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: It's another Peanuts one, but this is a standout. Hey, guys,
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: Charles Schultz was a huge part of my childhood, though
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: I never never met the man. He spent a short
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: amount of time living in Colorado Springs early in his career.
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: While living there, painted a mural on the nursery room
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: in the house that had many early depictions of the
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: Peanuts characters. Years later, long after he moved out, my grandparents,
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: Stan and Polly Trabnachek bought the house. Over the years,
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: they heard rumors from neighbors that Al Schultz had lived
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: there and painted a wall. At this point, the wall
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: had been painted over several times, but my grandma is
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: an amateur painter, you know a thing or two about paint.
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: So after lots of deliberating and researching, she decided to
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: try and remove the layers of paint over the mural
• 49:30
  Speaker 2: bit by bit using cotton swabs. Wait to go, man,
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: I love Polly Trabnachek for doing this, because it would
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: have been lost the time the wall and all the
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: characters were revealed. Many of my childhood memories involved that wall.
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: My parents, my grandparents sorry, would even give free tours
• 49:47
  Speaker 2: of the wall to anyone interested. And this gets so great.
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: When mister Schultz passed away, my grandparents reached out to
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: the family offered to donate the wall to be a
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: part of the Schultz Museum. So the estate core NATed
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: to have that wall literally cut from the house, loaded
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: onto a truck and shipped to California. I will never
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: forget that cold, rainy fall day in Colorado was around
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: nine or ten years old. The Schultz family treated my
• 50:12
  Speaker 2: grandparents like cherished friends for years after that, and even
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: flew them out first class to be there for the
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: opening of the museum. Mister Schultz was a wonderful man,
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: had an amazing family and made the world a better place.
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: And that is for Mike de Youong and I saw
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: pictures and it was really pretty unbelievable. You can google
• 50:32
  Speaker 2: this wall and look it up, and I can't imagine
• 50:35
  Speaker 2: the effort that his Granny Travnacheck, Nana Travna Check Nana
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: Travnacheck put forth to tediously, meticulously expose that great work
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: of art.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: Also, Chuck, She was researching this at a time where
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: you had to like go to the library to find
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: stuff this out and they ruined it. Yeah, oh easily
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: it could have been like that monkey g this art
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: restoration thing, you remember that, uh huh okay. And I
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: also want to point out that the Schultz Museum flew
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: them out first class, back when first class actually meant
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: something too oh burn. So yeah, there it is the
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: most triumphant, greatest Peanuts email we received from that episode.
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: We got a lot of good ones, but Mike Dion
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: took the cake. So thanks for telling us all that, Mike,
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: and hats off to Granny Nana travna Check and the
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: whole family and the Schultz Museum. That was pretty cool stuff.
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with us like
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: Mike did, we'd love to hear from you via email
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.