0
SPEAKER_02
Guess what, Will?
0
SPEAKER_02
What s up, Mango?
0
SPEAKER_02
I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
0
SPEAKER_02
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
0
SPEAKER_02
We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
0
SPEAKER_02
And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
0
SPEAKER_02
So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
0
SPEAKER_02
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_01
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
0
SPEAKER_01
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
0
SPEAKER_01
I m your host, Gabby Collins.
0
SPEAKER_01
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
0
SPEAKER_01
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
0
SPEAKER_01
Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0
SPEAKER_01
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
0
SPEAKER_03
Hey everybody, we are coming to a town ostensibly near you, so putatively see us.
0
SPEAKER_04
That s right.
0
SPEAKER_04
May 29th we ll be in Boston, really Medford, Massachusetts.
0
SPEAKER_04
The next night we re going to go down to Washington, D.C.
0
SPEAKER_04
and then scooch back up to New York City at Town Hall on May 31st.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, and if you re one of those people who likes to plan way far in advance, then you can go ahead and get tickets for our shows in August.
0
SPEAKER_03
We re gonna start out where, Chuck?
0
SPEAKER_04
We re gonna be in Chicago August 7th, Minneapolis August 8th, then Indianapolis for the very first time on August 9th, and then we re gonna wrap it up in Durham, North Carolina and right here in Atlanta on September 5th and September 7th.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yep, so you can get all the info you need and all the ticket links you need by going to stuffyoushouldknow.com and hitting that tour button, or you can also go to linktree.com.
0
SPEAKER_03
We ll see you guys this year.
0
SPEAKER_00
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
0
SPEAKER_03
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
0
SPEAKER_03
I m Josh, there s Chuck, and Jerry s back.
0
SPEAKER_03
I don t know if you guys do or not, but Jerry s back because, yeah, guest producer Ben was sitting in for a while, and now Jerry s back.
0
SPEAKER_03
So everybody, Jerry s back, in case you hadn t heard of him.
0
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, and we re back from a break.
0
SPEAKER_04
I had the spring break, and thereby, you had spring break.
0
SPEAKER_04
You re welcome.
0
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_04
Thanks.
0
SPEAKER_04
Thanks a lot.
0
SPEAKER_04
Where d you go?
0
SPEAKER_04
One of us gets a kid.
0
SPEAKER_04
We all get a kid.
0
SPEAKER_04
Yup.
0
SPEAKER_04
Uh, I went to Isle of Palms again for the first time in like four years.
0
SPEAKER_04
Very nice.
0
SPEAKER_04
And, uh, it was great.
0
SPEAKER_04
It s good to be back.
0
SPEAKER_04
I love that place.
0
SPEAKER_04
Did you get arrested again?
0
SPEAKER_04
No, I never got arrested there.
0
SPEAKER_03
Oh.
0
SPEAKER_03
What are you talking about?
0
SPEAKER_04
I ve never been arrested anywhere.
0
SPEAKER_03
I know.
0
SPEAKER_03
I just wanted to throw everybody off.
0
SPEAKER_03
Oh, okay.
0
SPEAKER_03
The casual listeners are like, oh, Chuck got arrested before?
0
SPEAKER_03
Okay.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_03
Dig it up, people.
0
SPEAKER_04
It doesn t exist.
0
SPEAKER_03
So I am really excited about this one, Chuck.
0
SPEAKER_03
It d been on my list for a while.
0
SPEAKER_03
I think I came across a top 10 list about like 10 weird things about atomic clocks that a HowStuffWorks writer named Patrick Kiger wrote.
0
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_03
And I just had it on the list, but I hadn t really read it enough to know what was going on.
0
SPEAKER_03
And it wasn t until I started digging into the research that I was like, these things are really interesting.
0
SPEAKER_03
And the idea of our modern world, you know, I sound like a frozen caveman lawyer, but it s true.
0
SPEAKER_03
Like everything from air traffic control to the internet to
0
SPEAKER_03
Basically, everything except talking to one another on cans connected by string, you can thank atomic clocks for.
0
SPEAKER_03
It just simply wouldn t be possible without the atomic clock.
0
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, and by saying that, what you re saying is, and we ll dig into this more later, is that the world, for everything to operate correctly in a tech-forward world, it has to be synchronized.
0
SPEAKER_04
And you can t synchronize something unless everybody agrees on what time it is.
0
SPEAKER_04
And that s all an atomic clock is.
0
SPEAKER_04
It is very simply, and we ll get into how these things work, which sounds difficult, but it s actually pretty simple still.
0
SPEAKER_04
It is the most accurate,
0
SPEAKER_04
timepiece on planet Earth, and it is a self-correcting clock that uses old tech in a way in the form of quartz crystals.
0
SPEAKER_03
Oh, you gave it away.
0
SPEAKER_04
I mean, the first thing we re going to talk about, probably.
0
SPEAKER_04
Quartz crystals, which is old tech, and it is constantly being checked and corrected using new tech in the form of the element CCM133.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, very well put.
0
SPEAKER_04
It s just a clock that sets itself very often and accurately.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, because everybody who s ever had any experience with a clock or a watch or something like that knows that it can gain or lose time.
0
SPEAKER_03
It can drift, essentially.
0
SPEAKER_04
You know what they say, though.
0
SPEAKER_03
What do they say?
0
SPEAKER_04
Even the worst clock is correct twice a day.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, they do say that.
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_03
So you mentioned quartz, right?
0
SPEAKER_03
I did.
0
SPEAKER_03
That s a big deal.
0
SPEAKER_03
And what quartz is, if you ve ever, I had no idea what quartz was in a watch or a clock.
0
SPEAKER_03
I just had seen quartz and you know.
0
SPEAKER_03
It was like decades before I realized it wasn t a brand.
0
SPEAKER_03
They were saying, hey, there s quartz inside.
0
SPEAKER_03
And what they re doing is boasting about how reliable their clock is.
0
SPEAKER_03
Because when we used to, we used to use things like mechanical stuff, like springs that you would wind that would power a bunch of gears, and that would kind of... Gears?
0
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, the movement of the gears would tick off seconds, right?
0
SPEAKER_03
How do gears work though?
0
SPEAKER_03
Oh, we ll get into that in a different episode.
0
SPEAKER_03
Right?
0
SPEAKER_03
Or you had a pendulum ticking off time, something like that.
0
SPEAKER_03
And then when we moved to quartz, what quartz does is it ticks off time as well, because we figured out at some, I don t know who tried this first, but if you apply an electrical current to quartz, you mechanically
0
SPEAKER_03
like disfigure it.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s called the piezoelectric effect.
0
SPEAKER_03
And after you, I guess, as a result of that contortion, it emits energy.
0
SPEAKER_03
It s like, it s like its way of saying uncle.
0
SPEAKER_03
And when it emits energy, it emits it at a really reliable frequency.
0
SPEAKER_03
And we figured out how to use that reliable frequency to tell time.
0
SPEAKER_03
And it s pretty, pretty nuts how
0
SPEAKER_03
complicated clocks are and just how it kind of to me falls in line with that Arthur C. Clarke quote that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.
0
SPEAKER_03
I think applying electricity to quartz to keep time is right up there with that kind of thing.
0
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
0
SPEAKER_04
You mentioned it s a piezoelectric material and, you know, we apply electricity to it just to affect it.
0
SPEAKER_04
Like you could bend cords or smack it or flick it with your finger or something.
0
SPEAKER_04
Any kind of mechanical stress on it and it would do the same thing.
0
SPEAKER_04
It would produce an electrical charge that s going to come out in pulses.
0
SPEAKER_04
And what those pulses do is they, in the terms of a clock or a watch, is they mimic the swinging of that pendulum.
0
SPEAKER_04
But in this case, like a pendulum ideally swings at once per second.
0
SPEAKER_04
In this case, it s 32,768 pulses per second that that quartz crystal is emitting.
0
SPEAKER_04
And you talked about whacking it or something.
0
SPEAKER_04
It looks like, if you look at like the quartz they use, it looks like a little tiny tuning fork.
0
SPEAKER_03
Oh, neato, I hadn t seen that.
0
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, it s just a little itty-bitty tiny tuning fork, and just like you would whack a tuning fork and it would, you know, whatever a tuning fork does.
0
SPEAKER_03
It goes wom-wom-wom-wom-wom-wom-wom.
0
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, that s not what this is about.
0
SPEAKER_04
But that quartz does the same thing, and we ll come back to that 32,768 pulses per second a few times, because the whole idea with the development, and as we get into history here, of the atomic clock is,
0
SPEAKER_04
The more little pulses or ticks that you have, the more accurate, within a second of time, the more accurate a clock is going to be.
0
SPEAKER_04
And the development of the atomic clock has always been about just making that number as large as possible.
0
SPEAKER_04
And I guess we shouldn t reveal where we re at now, but it s in the matter of billions.
0
SPEAKER_03
Well, so if you start from the, say like an old grandfather clock, as a pendulum swings from one side to the other, that s a second, right?
0
SPEAKER_03
And we ll call that a tick.
0
SPEAKER_03
It ticks off a second by swinging from one side to the other.
0
SPEAKER_03
And if that pendulum is off just a little bit, say by a tenth of a second, right?
0
SPEAKER_03
Every 10 seconds, it s going to lose a second.
0
SPEAKER_03
right?
0
SPEAKER_03
Because it has far fewer things to tick off.
0
SPEAKER_03
It has one tick per second.
0
SPEAKER_03
And like you were kind of hinting at, with crystals, you have 32,000 plus ticks per second.
0
SPEAKER_03
So if it misses one tick out of, like, if it misses a tenth of the ticks, that s far, far fewer in total than it is to that one tick or that tenth of a tick that the pendulum
1
SPEAKER_03
And so the more accurate the clock is, the more it s what s called stable.
1
SPEAKER_03
And that s the goal of super precise clocks, stability, which is it s going to measure a second exactly the same now as it will 10,000 years from now.
1
SPEAKER_03
That s stability.
1
SPEAKER_03
And that s the goal.
1
SPEAKER_03
And that s why we started to turn to things like the atom.
1
SPEAKER_03
which, if we can figure out how to measure the atom accurately, it s going to release X number of ticks every time, anywhere in the universe, if we can measure it when it s excited.
1
SPEAKER_03
And that s kind of where we re at with atomic clocks.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and if you re wondering, you know, in the terms of analog technology with watches and clocks, they fall out of whack for a number of reasons, because mainly because it s analog technology, like a spring gets weaker over time, gears can come out of balance, even when it comes to crystals, like when they got the quartz crystal involved, that was pretty good, like 32,768 pulses per second, like that s not too bad at all.
1
SPEAKER_02
But they can, quartz can gunk up a little bit because it s a naturally occurring thing.
1
SPEAKER_02
And we ll talk about where you find that in a minute.
1
SPEAKER_02
And temperature, atmospheric pressure, all of these things can throw even quartz out of whack because it operates really well, you know, basically at room temperature.
1
SPEAKER_02
But once you start applying, you know, really cold, like a watch in the really, really cold weather, an analog watch or really, really hot weather,
1
SPEAKER_02
isn t going to be as accurate.
1
SPEAKER_02
So all of these things, again, for many, many, many hundreds of years, like all this stuff was fine because they just needed to tell time and get it pretty darn close.
1
SPEAKER_02
And that was good enough.
1
SPEAKER_02
But when we started going into space, when we started launching satellites, certainly when the Internet came online, we started using GPS to
1
SPEAKER_02
do things like, oh, A, get you places, B, bomb, unfortunately, bomb hopefully the right place from a satellite communication in a war.
1
SPEAKER_02
Being off a little bit can cost human lives and lose a lot of money in other cases.
1
SPEAKER_02
So accuracy and that stability was a really, really important goal to reach.
1
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I found a really good kind of comparison of, you know, why that s so important, that accuracy.
1
SPEAKER_03
So, like, with a quartz clock or a watch, it might lose 15 seconds over 30 days, which is not bad.
1
SPEAKER_03
If you re running a train schedule, a quartz watch will do just fine, right?
1
SPEAKER_03
But if you re trying to, like, say, land a lunar lander on the moon,
1
SPEAKER_03
If you re off by something like a millisecond, you might overshoot the moon by like 200 miles, 300 or so kilometers, just by a millisecond.
1
SPEAKER_03
And a lander needs to be accurate within like 100 meters.
1
SPEAKER_03
So a millisecond off in your calculations can make you miss your spot by like 3000 times.
1
SPEAKER_03
That s not good at all.
1
SPEAKER_03
So that s why we need this kind of accurate stuff.
1
SPEAKER_03
And there s all tons of applications, like we ll talk about it later.
1
SPEAKER_03
But it just kind of goes to show like just how vital time is when you start using it as a factor in really heavy formulas, which are the kind of formulas they use to land landers on the moon, the heaviest.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I got one more for you.
1
SPEAKER_02
A microsecond even, just a microsecond.
1
SPEAKER_02
An error in the order of a microsecond can be a 300 meter or about 320 something yards difference.
1
SPEAKER_02
So that s still a lot.
1
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, sure.
1
SPEAKER_03
So again, you need precision and people have been working for quite a while now to make
1
SPEAKER_03
clocks as precise as possible.
1
SPEAKER_03
Do you want to, like, take a break and then start talking about the history of the atomic clock?
1
SPEAKER_02
I think so.
1
SPEAKER_02
I think that was, I mean, maybe one of our best setups ever, between you and me.
1
SPEAKER_02
I don t want to get this out on the air, but this is just us talking.
1
SPEAKER_02
We ll edit that out.
1
SPEAKER_02
All right, we ll edit that out, but I think we re on the right track.
1
SPEAKER_03
OK, well, we ll be right back, everybody.
1
SPEAKER_07
Guess what, Mango?
1
SPEAKER_07
What s that, Will?
1
SPEAKER_07
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
1
SPEAKER_08
I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
1
SPEAKER_08
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
1
SPEAKER_07
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
1
SPEAKER_08
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
1
SPEAKER_08
Yeah, that s a better idea.
1
SPEAKER_08
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
1
SPEAKER_08
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
1
SPEAKER_08
is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto.
1
SPEAKER_08
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
1
SPEAKER_07
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
1
SPEAKER_07
How do dollar stores stay in business?
1
SPEAKER_07
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
1
SPEAKER_07
There absolutely is.
1
SPEAKER_08
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
1
SPEAKER_08
But if you love mind blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part Time Genius.
1
SPEAKER_07
Listen to Part Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1
SPEAKER_05
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
1
SPEAKER_05
I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
1
SPEAKER_05
Stacey thought she had the perfect husband.
1
SPEAKER_05
Doctor, father, family man.
1
SPEAKER_05
It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind.
1
SPEAKER_06
They led me into the house, and I mean, it was like a movie.
1
SPEAKER_06
He was sitting at our kitchen table.
1
SPEAKER_06
The cops were guarding him.
1
SPEAKER_05
Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself.
1
SPEAKER_06
I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed.
1
SPEAKER_00
He did not just say, I wish he was dead.
1
SPEAKER_00
He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him.
1
SPEAKER_06
He, to me, is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer.
1
SPEAKER_05
Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1
SPEAKER_01
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
1
SPEAKER_01
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
1
SPEAKER_01
I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
1
SPEAKER_01
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
1
SPEAKER_01
Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
1
SPEAKER_01
Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
1
SPEAKER_01
We re discussing it all.
1
SPEAKER_01
I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
1
SPEAKER_01
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
1
SPEAKER_01
Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1
SPEAKER_01
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
1
SPEAKER_04
Chuck Chuck Chuck Chuck
1
SPEAKER_03
So we have a very famous physics professor named Isidore Rabi, who turned down the job of being Oppenheimer s right-hand man at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project, and instead went off and did his own thing.
1
SPEAKER_03
And one of the things he developed is he discovered nuclear magnetic resonance.
1
SPEAKER_03
And he figured out that s used in the wonder machine, the MRI.
1
SPEAKER_03
That s how it does its thing.
1
SPEAKER_03
he figured out how to train that into, or how to use it to great effect in what s called an atomic beam magnetic resonance, which essentially is a way to trap and push around and excite atoms that you want to specifically mess with.
1
SPEAKER_03
That s maybe the 10,000 feet version of what atomic beam magnetic resonance is.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_02
And when we say, we re going to say things like exciting atoms, that just means they re moving around.
1
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, so just, I guess we could toss it out real quick now.
1
SPEAKER_03
An atom has a ground state, which is its resting state, and an excited state.
1
SPEAKER_03
And it can have multiple excited states, but it s either resting or in some sort of excited state or other, right?
1
SPEAKER_03
So, Rabi was like, hey, this nuclear beam
1
SPEAKER_03
I have a feeling you guys could make an atomic clock out of it.
1
SPEAKER_03
And everybody said, you guys, why don t you make it?
1
SPEAKER_03
And he said, you go make it.
1
SPEAKER_03
I hecking dare you, was his famous quote.
1
SPEAKER_03
You do it.
1
SPEAKER_03
No, you do it.
1
SPEAKER_03
So somebody went off and did it.
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_03
And I think within four years, the National Bureau of Standards, which is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, they said, we ve got this.
1
SPEAKER_03
We did it, Rabi.
1
SPEAKER_03
And he s like, what are you talking about?
1
SPEAKER_03
He had terrible forgetfulness.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they said we built the first atomic clock, and this is the earliest version used ammonia as the molecule and the source of the vibrations.
2
SPEAKER_01
So they were using like copper piping to heat it up and shoot it out.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was, compared to what we have today, very rudimentary.
2
SPEAKER_01
It worked pretty well as a proof of concept, as in, hey, we can do this.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it was a little bit off.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think it was about a second every four months, better than quartz, but still not as good as we needed to get to.
2
SPEAKER_01
But again, it proved conceptually that an atomic clock was a thing that works better.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, for sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
But what s strange about ammonia is it has a lower frequency, so there s less ticks per second than the quartz crystal does.
2
SPEAKER_00
It has like 23,000 ticks per second or 23,870 Hertz, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
But like you said, they figured out that, yes, you can use an atom to keep track of time, but they re like, we got to find something better than that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s try cesium.
2
SPEAKER_00
And in 1952, yeah, exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
I could not find anywhere why they decided on cesium.
2
SPEAKER_00
I know it s like neutral, and maybe it s like it only, maybe because it only does have two states, either ground or excited.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m not exactly sure why, but it s a really weird element, and it s difficult to work with, especially at like room temperature, because it can just suddenly catch fire if it wants to.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, I saw why they used it.
2
SPEAKER_01
You ll be glad to know.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, all of this stuff has to deal with oscillation, which is basically whether it s a pendulum swinging or that spring moving the gears.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oscillation just means something that s moving back and forth at a regular rate.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it turns out that CCM 133, and when something is oscillating, and when you re speaking of like a clock or a timepiece,
2
SPEAKER_01
That s called a frequency reference, like you re literally referencing a frequency that needs to be steady.
2
SPEAKER_01
And CCM133, they found, just was the most consistent frequency reference that they could find in nature.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that was important because
2
SPEAKER_01
using something natural meant that humans all of a sudden were taken out of the equation for the first time, which was a breakthrough because it s like this stuff is consistent till the cows come home and human hands aren t making it so.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, the only thing that humans have to do is to figure out how to excite it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And once you get it excited, it s going to do the same thing every time, like I said, anywhere in the universe.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then how to measure it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And those are like the advances in atomic clocks, figuring out how to more accurately measure cesium atoms once you get them excited.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s kind of like the advance.
2
SPEAKER_00
Once they figured out how to excite cesium and then how to measure it, they had the first atomic clock all the way back in 1952.
2
SPEAKER_00
The thing is, they started kind of advancing by leaps and bounds because with cesium, I think, do you want to go ahead and reveal how many ticks cesium gives off every second?
2
SPEAKER_01
I guess we should, huh?
2
SPEAKER_00
I think you should take it, man.
2
SPEAKER_01
All right, so it was $32,000 and change for quartz for that pulse.
2
SPEAKER_01
CCM133 oscillates at $9,192,631,770.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think we would all agree that s quite a jump from $32,000 and change.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is.
2
SPEAKER_00
And like you said, oscillate is something that is just moving back and forth.
2
SPEAKER_00
It can also oscillate up and down.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if something oscillates up and down, what you re talking about is a wave.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if you put a bunch of waves together, you have a frequency, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
If you have a point in space that you re detecting a wave passing, and you count how many pass in one second, you re tracking the frequency of that wavelength, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Which I think in that sense is a hertz.
2
SPEAKER_00
Whatever happens in a second is a hertz.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s the old slogan.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so if you could see the waves coming off of a cesium atom as it returns back to its ground state, it got really excited and it shoots off a photon.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the photon itself has waves where if you could just stand still and watch it pass and count the waves, you would count 9,192,631,770 waves pass by you in exactly one second.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it became so clear that you could literally set your watch to this kind of thing, if you could figure out how to measure it, that back in 1967, the international community said, let s just attach the second to the cesium atom.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the cesium atom said, I better get some money for this.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, like let s literally redefine what a second means based on this cesium 133.
2
SPEAKER_01
Prior to that, it was based on like, you know, the sun coming up and going down.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was a solar day.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it was 186,400.
2
SPEAKER_01
Man, that s really hard to get my head around.
2
SPEAKER_01
One over 86,400 is the average length of a solar day, just that little fraction.
2
SPEAKER_01
So they said, let s just redefine it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think we should go through a little bit sort of the jumps that they made.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I agree.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because this is all just kind of like, I mean, who cares about this?
2
SPEAKER_01
What people really want to know is how much more accurate was this stuff?
2
SPEAKER_01
In 1959, I believe the 1955 was the first cesium-based clock.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then in 1959, they had an error rate of one second per 2,000 years.
2
SPEAKER_01
Five years later, it was second every 6,000 years.
2
SPEAKER_01
It could lose or gain a second.
2
SPEAKER_01
Let me see.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s the next one? 1999.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, let s go to the mid-70s first.
2
SPEAKER_01
It was one second every 300,000 years.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then finally, in 1999, when they debuted the cesium fountain, which that s still what they re using today, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s kind of the general state of the art, although they re just still looking into new stuff, too.
2
SPEAKER_00
How much better do you need to get it, though?
2
SPEAKER_01
They re getting it pretty good.
2
SPEAKER_01
So 1999, it became you could lose a second every 20 million years.
2
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then by 2013, they said, we can actually go back in time and say that using this method, we have not lost a second since the Big Bang.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that last one you mentioned is a strontium lattice clock, which is, again, we just talked about once we figure out how to measure the vibration of an atom, once it s excited and returns to its ground state, it s just a question of becoming better and better at measuring it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so they figured out that if you hold strontium atoms in
2
SPEAKER_00
laser beams form a lattice, you can basically hold them in place and measure them much more accurately.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that s what represented that crazy, amazing leap.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I was trying to figure out, like, how can they say, like, this thing would not have lost a second since the beginning of the universe?
2
SPEAKER_00
How can you possibly do that?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a haughty claim.
2
SPEAKER_00
It really is.
2
SPEAKER_00
But they know how to back it up.
2
SPEAKER_00
So what they do is they ll compare the output of one strontium clock to another strontium clock,
2
SPEAKER_00
And the difference, the biggest difference between the two, they ll take that and say that that s the discrepancy, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And because these things vibrate at such crazy huge numbers per second, that the loss of like one or two waves over a second
2
SPEAKER_00
it just adds up to these crazy huge numbers.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it lost one wave essentially for every 10 to the 10th power waves, which is like, I think 10 billion waves, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So when you start adding that up to the number of seconds in a day, in a year, in a century, you suddenly realize like, okay, this thing is not going to lose a second for, you know, 15 billion years.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s how they do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Amazing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Math is how they do it, I should say.
2
SPEAKER_00
Let s give math its due for once.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, all the maths, as they say in England.
2
SPEAKER_00
For sure.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we re going to explain how this works now.
2
SPEAKER_01
Kind of the remarkable surprise of it all is that these things, and I guess it s not much of a surprise because I mentioned it at the very beginning.
2
SPEAKER_01
It could have been.
2
SPEAKER_01
But they still use quarts
2
SPEAKER_01
as part of this system.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just it s a feedback loop that starts with a quartz crystal and ends up with a quartz crystal.
2
SPEAKER_01
And in between, this science voodoo happens that just is all about self-correcting as it feeds back into that quartz crystal to be, you know, shot back out again in the form of microwaves.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I m glad that you really kind of stepped up and took charge here because when we re researching, we ll send like, you know, especially day of stuff, we ll send just like a little last minute details or maybe better explanations of something that we have when we re researching.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Chuck stepped up and was like, okay, let s not over explain this.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is actually kind of a simple thing in concept.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you rescued me from sheer madness.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is our thing though.
3
SPEAKER_01
I had looked into the abyss and found atomic clocks just staring back at me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was something that you really rescued me from, and I appreciate it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want to say hats off to you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, thanks, but we re not done.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, God.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s still a chance to over-explain this into confusion.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, then allow me to try that.
3
SPEAKER_00
All right, take it away, because it s all about this outermost electron, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
So with cesium, I guess then the reason they selected cesium is because it has 55 electrons.
3
SPEAKER_01
54 of them are so tightly locked in orbit around the nucleus that they basically don t get excited.
3
SPEAKER_01
That 55th outermost electron, though, it gets excited pretty easy, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
But it only gets excited when it s exposed to a frequency of electromagnetic radiation at specifically 9,192,631,770 cycles, or hertz, if you offered ice cream.
3
SPEAKER_01
It gets kind of excited, sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it may not fall out of its ground state.
3
SPEAKER_01
It depends.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is it Jenny s ice cream?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is it that, like, butter cake, gooey butter cake?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s going to get excited from that one.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is it just, you know, some dippy old, you know, Breyers that s been in the freezer for several months?
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I knew you were going to say Breyers.
3
SPEAKER_00
Poor Breyers.
3
SPEAKER_01
No shade on Breyers, but if it sits there for a few months, it s going to form ice crystals.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nobody, even the cesium atom s not going to get excited by this.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, what was it in, did you see the Alfred Brooks movie Mother?
3
SPEAKER_01
Albert Brooks and yes, what d I say?
3
SPEAKER_01
I think you said Alfred Brooks.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that s his butler Well, no, but well now that we re off on this track, you know, their original name was Einstein Albert Einstein was his name No, Albert Brooks his name.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, because his brother was super Dave Osborne Bob Einstein.
3
SPEAKER_00
I
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh my goodness, yes, I forgot about that connection.
3
SPEAKER_00
But he obviously changed his name.
3
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, his movie Mother with the great Debbie Reynolds.
3
SPEAKER_00
Carrie Fisher s mom.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Boy, we re just all over the place.
3
SPEAKER_00
There was a very funny joke about the ice crystals on the ice cream.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I can t remember what she called it, but something like a protective barrier or something that it forms, like to really preserve the ice cream underneath.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s a good one.
3
SPEAKER_01
I feel bad for Fleischman from Northern Exposure because he has to play such a jerk and he does it so well.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
I saw an episode of that, a couple of episodes on our last tour actually.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, Chuck, I think, have you seen the whole series?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I saw it back when I was a huge Northern fan, but then watched a couple, I watched the first two Epps when we were, I was in the hotel in one of our towns.
3
SPEAKER_01
And how did it hold up?
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, it held up pretty good for a show of that era.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, great.
3
SPEAKER_01
Fantastic.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m glad to hear that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
I loved it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was going to say, I think that the last episode was one of the best last episodes of any show ever.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t remember it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or no.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
Sorry.
3
SPEAKER_01
Not last episode.
3
SPEAKER_01
Fleischman s last episode.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, when he goes back to New York.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t remember.
3
SPEAKER_00
Did he leave and the show continued?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
For a little while.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t remember.
3
SPEAKER_00
Uh, this guy, when Steve Carell left the office, I was done.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, his last, there was some moments of brilliance in there, in the office after Carell left, but it wasn t, yeah, it wasn t reliably great every single episode.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they got wackier and wackier as time went on, but that happens, especially when a showrunner leaves too.
3
SPEAKER_00
How did we get sidetracked?
3
SPEAKER_00
I m talking about the ice crystals.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, Mother.
3
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, I just wanted to give a shout out to the Alfred Brooks movie, Defending Your Life.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s so great.
3
SPEAKER_01
Far and away his best movie, if you ask me.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a really good documentary on him that s out now that Rob Reiner did, in case you re interested.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, cool.
3
SPEAKER_01
All right.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we re back to cesium, and I was saying that it gets excited at that same frequency that it emits a photon at, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what it takes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so what they figured out is that you can figure
3
SPEAKER_01
You can find out if your quartz crystal oscillator, the thing that you re using to keep time with, it s super reliable, but again, subject to frequency drift here or there, but you can find out how far off
3
SPEAKER_01
or whether it s keeping reliable time by comparing it to the excitement of a cesium atom.
3
SPEAKER_01
If the quartz crystal is putting out the right frequency, the cesium atom will become excited and it will shoot off a photon.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if enough of them do that in this atomic clock, this gas chamber essentially that they have, then you know that your quartz crystal is keeping the right time because it s emitting the right number of pulses itself.
3
SPEAKER_01
I, the thing is Chuck, and this is where the madness lies for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t understand how they take 32,000 and change Hertz coming from the quartz crystal and translate that into 9 billion and change Hertz that excites the cesium atom.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what I don t get.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you get that?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, the way I understood it is that those two things are working independently, like the cesium is doing its thing at 9 billion plus hertz just to get a more accurate measurement.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then it s sending that correction.
3
SPEAKER_00
via another electronic signal.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think it goes into what s called a detector.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s, to me, where the magic is, because I watch a bunch of videos, even kids science videos, and it just says it goes into the detector and then back out, feeding into the quartz again.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what happens in that detector.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s detecting,
3
SPEAKER_01
Right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think they re actually tracking the photons.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s one of the beauties of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s why they kept quartz crystal technology around is because it releases radio waves, and we can read those really easily.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s one reason they kept quartz around.
3
SPEAKER_01
It keeps good time, and we understand it really well.
3
SPEAKER_01
But this is where I m thrown off.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, are they comparing the number of ticks that the quartz is giving off
3
SPEAKER_01
to the number of ticks that the cesium atom has given off in that same time span.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if the two match, then you know the quartz is still keeping good time.
3
SPEAKER_01
If it s off a little bit, then you know how much to adjust it because that cesium atom is not going to release
3
SPEAKER_01
any more waves than that number.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just not.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s never going to be 771.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s never going to be 769.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s always going to be that nine billion number.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I guess if you compare how many the crystal, which can have more or less over time, depending on how well it s functioning, if you compare those two, then you know that your quartz clock is keeping fully accurate time.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is that what it is?
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that s the deal.
3
SPEAKER_00
And all that it does once it reads
3
SPEAKER_00
Once those atoms are like, nope, you re actually off a little bit, I think it just tweaks that original electric current in the feedback loop, feeding back into the quartz.
3
SPEAKER_00
It punishes the quartz crystal from being off.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like that one guy who s being tested for ESP at the beginning of Ghostbusters.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s like, no, not again.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think I think that s I think that s it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Great.
3
SPEAKER_01
Good night.
3
SPEAKER_01
So let s talk about the second a little more, because I think we kind of jump past and I think it s worth including the actual definition because it s so great.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
What is it now since the official change?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_01
So this is what they changed to in 1967.
3
SPEAKER_01
The second, they re talking about the second, every, everybody who walks around is like, yeah, there s 60 seconds in a minute.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is the international definition of what a second is.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods
3
SPEAKER_01
of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.
3
SPEAKER_01
By the way, everybody, this definition refers to a cesium atom at rest at a temperature of zero Kelvin.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, but yeah, but you re like, okay, that doesn t really make any sense.
3
SPEAKER_01
But now that you understand how atomic clocks work, it does make sense.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re saying if you have something that is timed to this,
3
SPEAKER_01
You have a second, that s a second right there.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everybody s going to be on the same measure.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s why it s the international standard.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everyone is on the same measure and the cesium atom is never going to give out more or less of those waves when it s excited.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And like you said, you know, the reason one of the reasons that Quartz was used is because we had worked with it up until that point.
3
SPEAKER_00
We understood it.
3
SPEAKER_00
A lot of the tech was built around it.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ve known how to work with it and repair things using it.
3
SPEAKER_00
So like they didn t want to reinvent the wheel here.
3
SPEAKER_00
They just wanted to make that Quartz run more perfectly.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it turned out it was
3
SPEAKER_00
you know, sitting around in ore deposits in where, what, Maine and South Dakota?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And where cesium comes from, it s pretty rare.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the other thing that strikes me about this, Chuck, too, is when we adopted that second in 1967 and removed our seconds from the solar day, because it s so inaccurate, Kluge
4
SPEAKER_05
really, we actually became better at tracking the solar day when we turned our attention to tracking the atom for use as a benchmark for time rather than the solar day.
4
SPEAKER_05
I just think that s pretty neat and ironic.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I mean, they ve calculated that too, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
Like, because now we have what s called International Atomic Time, TAI.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s one of those backwards.
4
SPEAKER_02
French things.
4
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, backwards French things.
4
SPEAKER_02
But now we can actually track it using universal time and against the Earth s rotation and
4
SPEAKER_02
you know, the fact that we re off because, you know, things can slow the Earth down.
4
SPEAKER_02
Space dust can, solar winds, atmospheric resistance, the moon, you know, and gravity tugging on the Earth.
4
SPEAKER_02
So they can say now that UTC, coordinated universal time, is 30 seconds behind the TAI.
4
SPEAKER_02
Right.
4
SPEAKER_02
Which is pretty, pretty cool to be able to know that.
4
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, they re keeping better track of the spin of the Earth than the spin of the Earth is.
4
SPEAKER_05
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_05
It s crazy.
4
SPEAKER_05
They figured out that the Earth is slowing down by about two milliseconds each day.
4
SPEAKER_05
Could not have done that when you re pinning the second to 186,400th of a solar day.
4
SPEAKER_05
You need atomic clocks to measure stuff like that.
4
SPEAKER_05
So I just think that s just fantastically neat.
4
SPEAKER_05
And they ve done so many other stuff.
4
SPEAKER_05
There s so many other things with this already too.
4
SPEAKER_05
I say we take a break and we come back and talk about some of the applications for timekeeping in an ultra precise way.
4
SPEAKER_02
Let s do it.
4
SPEAKER_04
Guess what, Mango?
4
SPEAKER_04
What s that, Will?
4
SPEAKER_04
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
4
SPEAKER_03
I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
4
SPEAKER_03
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
4
SPEAKER_04
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
4
SPEAKER_03
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
4
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, that s a better idea.
4
SPEAKER_03
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
4
SPEAKER_03
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
4
SPEAKER_03
is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto.
4
SPEAKER_03
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
4
SPEAKER_04
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
4
SPEAKER_04
How do dollar stores stay in business?
4
SPEAKER_04
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
4
SPEAKER_04
There absolutely is.
4
SPEAKER_03
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
4
SPEAKER_03
But if you love mind blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part Time Genius.
4
SPEAKER_04
Listen to Part Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
4
SPEAKER_07
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
4
SPEAKER_07
I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
4
SPEAKER_07
Stacey thought she had the perfect husband.
4
SPEAKER_07
Doctor, father, family man.
4
SPEAKER_07
It was the perfect cover for Justin Rutherford to hide behind.
4
SPEAKER_06
They led me into the house, and I mean, it was like a movie.
4
SPEAKER_06
He was sitting at our kitchen table.
4
SPEAKER_06
The cops were guarding him.
4
SPEAKER_06
Stacey learned how far her husband would go to save himself.
4
SPEAKER_06
I slept with a loaded gun next to my bed.
4
SPEAKER_00
He did not just say, I wish he was dead.
4
SPEAKER_00
He actually gave details and explained different scenarios on how to kill him.
4
SPEAKER_06
He, to me, is scarier than Jeffrey Dahmer.
4
SPEAKER_07
Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
4
SPEAKER_01
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
4
SPEAKER_01
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
4
SPEAKER_01
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
4
SPEAKER_01
Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
4
SPEAKER_01
Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re discussing it all.
4
SPEAKER_01
I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
4
SPEAKER_01
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
4
SPEAKER_01
Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
4
SPEAKER_01
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
4
SPEAKER_02
So atomic clocks were a huge leap forward, but they were very big at first.
4
SPEAKER_02
Obviously, with all kinds of tech like this, it just gets smaller and smaller.
4
SPEAKER_02
I think about 20 years ago, they built an atomic clock that could be put upon a microprocessor.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s crazy.
4
SPEAKER_02
Totally crazy.
4
SPEAKER_02
And it s important to point out here that there are a little more than 400 atomic clocks all over the world and more than 70 labs operating these clocks.
4
SPEAKER_02
But you still need like, you know, one ring to rule them all.
4
SPEAKER_02
You need one clock
4
SPEAKER_02
to tell all the clocks what time it is.
4
SPEAKER_02
So the International Bureau of Weights and Measures averages all these atomic clocks that are operating in the world.
4
SPEAKER_02
It gives better weight to the ones that are really accurate.
4
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So if you got a gold star because your atomic clock in your lab is super accurate, you re going to be more heavily weighted.
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If there s a lot of known pot users in your lab, they re not going to weight it as heavily.
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So, well, ironically, we ll see here in a minute, comes from Colorado.
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But it is, then they re like, all right, this is the real time for the entire world.
4
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And then they message that out as what I mentioned earlier, International Atomic Time.
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And here in the United States, or I guess in all of North America, that is broadcast out from a radio station in Fort Collins, Colorado, WWVB, that all American clocks sync to.
4
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Yeah, there s all control clocks.
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SPEAKER_05
Exactly.
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Yeah.
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So if you have an atomic watch or an atomic alarm clock or something at your house, it s actually passively picking up those radio waves from WWVB and those radio waves are telling the clock what time it is.
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SPEAKER_05
So it s keeping accurate time because it s getting the information from from radio WWVB radio free Europe.
4
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Yeah, but that s the time that they re like, all right, this is what time it is on the Internet.
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And that s what time all your trains are going to run and your planes are going to take off and land.
4
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Yeah.
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Although those are always going to be late.
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But, you know, if we re operating in space, if we re using GPS and you can explain the thing you found on GPS, because that was pretty cool.
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But all of it is set to that that agreed upon average of all those atomic clocks.
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Yeah, and so people have their own like timekeeping stuff.
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Like if you have an iPhone or like Android or something like that, whoever is serving that phone has their own time servers, but their time servers are still, if you trace it back far enough,
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They re getting their information from the atomic clocks that are being maintained, at least in the U.S.
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by the National Institutes of Standard and Technology.
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And then we also have to give a shout out to the U.S.
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Naval Observatory.
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They started it first, and they still maintain their own set of atomic clocks.
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And they are the official timekeeper for the Department of Defense.
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But they re also the ones that you can call to get the accurate time.
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And in the United States, you can call 202-762-1401.
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And you will hear the voice of a man from the 70s who died in the 90s, who s still telling you what time it is.
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He apparently spent several days, Fred Goldsmith, I think.
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What s that number again?
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202-762-1401.
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All right, I m typing that into my phone because I had a weird urge about two months ago to call time, like we did when we were kids.
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You could call and get time and weather in most places.
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You still can t, yep.
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All right, I m glad to know that s a thing because I m going to do it from the phone that I know has all that information on it.
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SPEAKER_05
So yeah, I was reading like an AARP article on it, appropriately enough, and I think the actor s name is Fred Goldsmith, right?
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Yeah, that s where I get a lot of this information.
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No, no, but are you getting mailers yet?
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SPEAKER_05
No, I found I found it on the internet.
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Okay, just waiting to get your first mailer.
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He apparently Recorded every possible time it could be including seconds over the course of several days and they still use these recordings to tell you what time it is and
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Amazing.
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One of the other amazing things I saw is like, they just expected this to kind of go away once smartphones became so ubiquitous.
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People just didn t need it anymore.
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Your phone is automatically communicating with
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with your server, the time server for your phone company.
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Nope, in 2009, they actually started to see an increase in calls.
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So now people call more than they did in the early 2000s.
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SPEAKER_00
If you tell me movie phone is still around, I m going to just quit my job and do nothing but call those numbers all day.
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SPEAKER_01
You remember when Kramer figured out that, or no, did people think he had the movie phone number so he started being the movie phone person on the phone?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think that s what happened.
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SPEAKER_00
And when he didn t know the answers, like they would be punching in the numbers, he would say, why don t you just tell me the movie?
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SPEAKER_01
That s right.
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SPEAKER_01
Oh my God, that was good.
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SPEAKER_00
Classic rated R. Oh man.
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SPEAKER_01
I watched the puppy pirate shirt episode the other day and it was, I mean, it still holds up.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
All right, so we promised to talk of GPS.
5
SPEAKER_00
I didn t have time to dig into what you sent.
5
SPEAKER_00
So if you ve got it together enough, can you explain briefly how GPS works?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so you mentioned that some atomic clocks can be fit onto microchips now.
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SPEAKER_01
And you can find those microchips aboard satellites that orbit space.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we have satellites that are dedicated to GPS, Global Positioning System, right?
5
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I actually found this, I got to give a shout out to Arpita Sarkar, who is just some random person on Quora, who... We hope got it right.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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As long as they re not so masterful at mashing facts up into lies, essentially, but just covering it up perfectly.
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I m pretty sure this guy got it right.
5
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But essentially what they do is, if you re, like say you re using Waze or something, which I do use, shout out to Waze, I love it.
5
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It has a onboard GPS receiver somewhere.
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I don t know if it s in the Waze server or something like that.
5
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s using your phone.
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SPEAKER_01
It s probably using your phone.
5
SPEAKER_01
And what it s doing is it s receiving a signal from the GPS satellite saying, here s a signal of some GPS info, but also here s a timestamp that came from my own atomic clocks that I have on board this satellite, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And so your GPS receiver gets it, calculates how, using the speed of light as part of the formula, how long it took for you to get that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then it does it again with another satellite and another satellite, usually two or three.
5
SPEAKER_01
And based on all of the differences between how long it took for those satellites to send you that information, it can tell you within, I think, 10 feet.
5
SPEAKER_01
or 10 meters, I think, exactly where you are on planet Earth, because it triangulates your location.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s all thanks to atomic clocks.
5
SPEAKER_01
It wouldn t be possible to do that without atomic clocks.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
So, I mean, if you re geocaching, next time you get that Santana record out of the geocache, thank an atomic clock.
5
SPEAKER_00
Thank cesium-133.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yep.
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SPEAKER_00
Thank the good people of Maine
5
SPEAKER_01
and uh north or south dakota one of them i think it s south dakota uh was that a call back to like a 2009 episode
5
SPEAKER_01
Is that what we said you could find in the geocache things?
5
SPEAKER_00
Man, Chuck, that is a deep cut.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think apparently for a little while some people were, stuff you should know listeners, were putting Santana tapes and CDs in geocaches, but I m sure that s run its course.
5
SPEAKER_00
Or maybe not.
5
SPEAKER_01
Who knows?
5
SPEAKER_01
I ll bet there s some retro geocachers that are like, I got the Santana thing going on.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think I was saying geocaches.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s not word.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve heard people say that before, although maybe it was you from that episode in 2009.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve heard people say it.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve heard some dummies say it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
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What else can you do with this stuff, Chuck?
5
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I mean, I think that s a pretty good summation.
5
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Well, let me add one more thing.
5
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It s been used in physics experiments, too.
5
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It s vital in physics experiments because you re tracking, like, say, the decay of particles in atom smashers, and that happens so fast.
5
SPEAKER_01
that you couldn t do it without atomic clocks because they re tracking things in the billionths of a second, right?
5
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Pretty good stuff.
5
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It s also been used more than once to prove Einstein s theory of relativity that there s gravitational time dilation depending on the effects of gravity on you and how fast you re traveling in relation to the speed of light.
5
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time s either going to move faster or slower for you.
5
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And so people have taken atomic clocks and put them at different elevations.
5
SPEAKER_01
There was a very famous- Not even by much.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, I think 30 centimeters for one experiment, and it produced differences in time, time dilation.
5
SPEAKER_01
But there was a really famous experiment called the Halfley-Keating experiment,
5
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in 1971 where they put some atomic clocks on airliners and just flew around the world and then compared them when they got back to the clocks back on Earth and there was a clear distinction between time.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s very, very slight, but it s enough to prove that, yes, Einstein s theory of gravitational time dilation is correct.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, like that old thing that you will age faster living in the mountains than at sea level.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that old chestnut.
5
SPEAKER_00
It is true, but I think what they found out was if you d live in the mountains, it d be about 90 billionths of a second less life over a 79-year lifetime.
5
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Everybody s like, why bother?
5
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Why bother even telling us that?
5
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s one other thing too.
5
SPEAKER_01
So we mentioned, oh, we didn t mention, I m sorry, I left this out.
5
SPEAKER_01
Those GPS atomic clocks that they have on board, very, very precise.
5
SPEAKER_01
They still get updates twice a day from back here on Earth from those international timekeepers.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
just to make sure that the frequency drift hasn t taken over too much.
5
SPEAKER_01
It just updates them, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
You can t do that the further you get out from space.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, these satellites are only tens or dozens of miles above us, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
As we get further and further out into space, it becomes harder and harder to communicate with Earth and to get like updates about what time it is.
5
SPEAKER_01
So they re looking to build
5
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ultra precise atomic clocks that can go out in space on board spacecrafts that can keep their own time.
5
SPEAKER_01
They don t need any updating from back here on Earth.
5
SPEAKER_01
They re going to lose so little time over such a long period of time that they will essentially stay calibrated to the time back on Earth for incredibly long periods of time through incredibly long distances out into space.
5
SPEAKER_00
Why haven t they done that yet?
5
SPEAKER_00
That was my sort of question.
5
SPEAKER_00
Is that harder?
5
SPEAKER_01
They have.
5
SPEAKER_01
NASA launched the Deep Space Atomic Clock in 2019, which is like a test that apparently is going very well.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, OK.
5
SPEAKER_00
I was about to say, why don t they just throw one of those puppies aboard the spacecraft?
5
SPEAKER_01
But they did.
5
SPEAKER_01
And they re using mercury ions instead of cesium atoms or strontium.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s even better, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
It is, because so one of the things, these atoms, when you have them in like a cloud chamber or whatever, they can rub up basically against the sides of the chamber and it s going to mess with them a little bit.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s going to mess with your measurement some.
5
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With an ion, you can keep it trapped in an electromagnetic field.
5
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It s not going to mess with anything.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s not going to rub up against anything.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so that s how it stays so reliable.
5
SPEAKER_01
Your measurements are going to stay reliable for a very long time because they re not interacting with, you know, they re not bumping up against anything.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they re not slam dancing.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re doing the Billy Idol.
5
SPEAKER_00
They re dancing with themselves.
5
SPEAKER_01
Speaking of slam dancing, I went to Circle Jerks and Descendants last week, and it was amazing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And there were people, there was a pit for sure.
5
SPEAKER_01
I haven t seen one of those in a long time.
5
SPEAKER_00
Did you look down and Yumi was body surfing across the crowd?
5
SPEAKER_01
No, but she was into it.
5
SPEAKER_01
She was there for the Descendants.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was there for the Circle Jerks, but both shows were very good.
5
SPEAKER_01
And a fan came up and said hi at the show.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think I saw an email or something.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
She emailed and was like, I m sorry if it was awkward or weird.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I was like, it wasn t awkward or weird at all.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I m sure it was wonderful.
5
SPEAKER_01
But it was a very good show.
5
SPEAKER_01
And if you have a chance to see Descendants and Circle Jerks, and you like punk, go see it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Awesome.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s very good.
5
SPEAKER_00
Still at it.
5
SPEAKER_00
I love it.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you want to know anything more about atomic clocks, you can find a whole rabbit hole to go down and see if you can escape madness yourself.
5
SPEAKER_01
In the meantime, it s time for Listener Mail.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is one that we ve tried to get on recently.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s another Peanuts one, but this is a standout.
5
SPEAKER_00
Over the years, they heard rumors from neighbors that Alice Schultz had lived there and painted a wall.
5
SPEAKER_00
At this point, the wall had been painted over several times, but my grandma, who s an amateur painter, knew a thing or two about paint.
5
SPEAKER_00
So after lots of deliberating and researching, she decided to try and remove the layers of paint over the mural, bit by bit.
6
SPEAKER_04
using cotton swabs.
6
SPEAKER_04
Way to go.
6
SPEAKER_04
Man, I love Polly Drabnicek for doing this because it would have been lost to time.
6
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_04
The wall and all the characters were revealed.
6
SPEAKER_04
Many of my childhood memories involved that wall.
6
SPEAKER_04
My parents, my grandparents sorry, would even give free tours of the wall to anyone interested.
6
SPEAKER_04
And this gets so great.
6
SPEAKER_04
When Mr. Schultz passed away, my grandparents reached out to the family, offered to donate the wall to be a part of the Schultz Museum.
6
SPEAKER_04
So the estate coordinated to have that wall literally cut from the house, loaded onto a truck, and shipped to California.
6
SPEAKER_04
I will never forget that cold, rainy fall day in Colorado.
6
SPEAKER_04
I was around nine or 10 years old.
6
SPEAKER_04
The Schultz family treated my grandparents like cherished friends for years after that, and even flew them out.
6
SPEAKER_04
first class to be there for the opening of the museum.
6
SPEAKER_04
Mr. Schultz was a wonderful man, had an amazing family, and made the world a better place.
6
SPEAKER_04
And that is from Mike DeYoung, and I saw pictures, and it s really pretty unbelievable.
6
SPEAKER_04
You can Google this wall and look it up, and I can t imagine the effort that his granny, Trabnacek,
6
SPEAKER_05
Nanatravnicek?
6
SPEAKER_04
Nanatravnicek put forth to tediously, meticulously expose that great work of art.
6
SPEAKER_05
Also, Chuck, she was researching this at a time where you had to go to the library to find stuff like this out.
6
SPEAKER_05
Sure.
6
SPEAKER_04
Could have ruined it.
6
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, oh, easily.
6
SPEAKER_05
It could have been like that Monkey Jesus art restoration thing.
6
SPEAKER_05
Remember that?
6
SPEAKER_05
Uh-huh.
6
SPEAKER_05
Okay, and I also want to point out that the Schultz Museum flew them out first class back when first class actually meant something to you.
6
SPEAKER_04
Oh, burn.
6
SPEAKER_05
So yeah, there it is, the most triumphant, greatest peanuts email we received from that episode.
6
SPEAKER_05
We got a lot of good ones, but Mike DeYoung took the cake.
6
SPEAKER_05
So thanks for telling us all that, Mike.
6
SPEAKER_05
And hats off to Granny Nana Travnicek and the whole family and the Schultz Museum.
6
SPEAKER_05
That was pretty cool stuff.
6
SPEAKER_05
If you want to get in touch with us like Mike did, we d love to hear from you via email at stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
6
SPEAKER_06
Guess what, Will?
6
SPEAKER_06
What s that, Mango?
6
SPEAKER_06
I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
6
SPEAKER_06
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
6
SPEAKER_06
We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
6
SPEAKER_06
And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
6
SPEAKER_06
So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
6
SPEAKER_06
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
6
SPEAKER_02
A new season of Bridgerton is here.
6
SPEAKER_02
And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
6
SPEAKER_02
I m your host, Gabby Collins.
6
SPEAKER_02
And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
6
SPEAKER_02
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
6
SPEAKER_02
Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
6
SPEAKER_02
Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
6
SPEAKER_03
Last season, millions tuned into the Betrayal podcast to hear a shocking story of deception.
6
SPEAKER_03
I m Andrea Gunning, and now we re sharing an all-new story of betrayal.
6
SPEAKER_03
Justin Rutherford, doctor, father, family man.
6
SPEAKER_03
It was the perfect cover to hide behind.
6
SPEAKER_00
Detective Weaver said, I m sure you know why we re here.
6
SPEAKER_00
I was like, what in the world is going on?
6
SPEAKER_03
Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.