The primary aim of timekeeping is to measure the passage of a second. "Anyone who has had an operation can tell you about the former," he said wryly, "and anyone who tries to combine precise clock data at the nanosecond level can tell you about the latter." Matsakis likes to say he is often frustrated by expressions like "surgical precision" and "like clockwork." In this context, a simple wristwatch ticking according to a quartz crystal might seem almost offensive.
ATOMIC TIME KEEPING TV
It is the ticking of these clocks that tells so many of the other clocks-the ones on our phones, on our computers, our webpages, our TV screens, our radios, and our GPS systems-from your geolocation app to your Predator drone-what is the thing called "the time." More precisely: a set of the most sophisticated pendulums ever built, carefully counting the "swings" of atoms' radiation with a precision unknown anywhere else in the universe. It is, essentially, America's fifty-year-old grandfather clock, the hidden instrument of Washington's dominion over the world's time.Īt its heart, the USNO's Master Clock operates much like grandfather clocks do: with pendulums. As the chief scientist and former department head of the US Naval Observatory's Time Services department, he has spent an inordinate amount of time with what's called the Master Clock. Matsakis, a "sixty-something" physicist and astronomer with a tousled shock of silver hair, has been digging a lot. Time is also very messy, and measuring it is a kind of excavation.
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