![]() The precision timekeepers that were subsequently developed resolved the critical problem of finding a ship's position at sea and went on to play key roles in the industrial revolution and the advance of Western civilization. Although this new device satisfied the requirements of monastic and urban communities, it was too inaccurate and unreliable for scientific application until the pendulum was employed to govern its operation. Western Europeans adopted these technologies, but by the 13th century, demand for a dependable timekeeping instrument led medieval artisans to invent the mechanical clock. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Naval Observatory in the 1980s showed the clock had an accuracy of 1 second in about 12 years.Humankind's efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The clock is so accurate that the pendulums can be used to measure gravitational effects from the sun and moon, and it was this instrument that showed the Earth's rotation was not, in fact, uniform. The secondary clock would send an electrical pulse every 30 seconds to the primary one, to ensure that the two stayed synchronized, and the pendulum in the vacuum was made of a nickel and iron alloy to reduce any thermal expansion, which would alter the length of the pendulum and thus its swing. The clock was actually a dual system, consisting of one pendulum in a vacuum tank linked by electric wires. The Shortt clock, invented in 1921, was a standard scientific instrument in observatories until atomic clocks replaced it. (Image credit: NIST/Public Domain)Ītomic clocks get all the glory, but O'Brian said that before they came along scientists still had to use mechanical clocks - and some were quite accurate. Ī Shortt-Synchronome free pendulum clock in the NIST Museum, Gaithersburg, Maryland. This clock will gain or lose a second about once every 300 million years. The frequency of the radiation that alters the states of the most atoms is what NIST uses to define seconds.Its accuracy comes in part because it operates at a chill minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 193 degrees Celsius) the cold conditions help to shield the cesium atoms from stray heat that could alter the measurements of the atom's oscillations. ![]() The clock uses a set of six lasers to cool the atoms (about 10 million of them), while another pair of lasers gently lofts the atoms upward inside a chamber filled with microwave radiation. The NIST F2 also synchronizes telecommunications and even trading in financial markets for the official time of day. (Image credit: NIST)įirst brought on line in 2014, this clock, along with its predecessor, the NIST F1, helps to determine the standard second used by scientists all over the world. NIST physicists Steve Jefferts (foreground) and Tom Heavner with the NIST-F2 cesium fountain atomic clock. When they speak of accuracy, scientists typically are referring to how well a clock matches a given standard reference, so in that sense the most accurate clock is always the one they set the standard second with. Scientists usually refer to precision when they say a clock is so accurate that it will gain or lose a second over millions of years. Average a large number of ticks, say, 100,000 of them, and you will get a number that can be measured against the actual time the clock keeps. Stability is how much a clock's ticks vary over a given amount of time. By comparing two clocks, scientists can measure the uncertainty in reading that frequency – how precise a clock is. For an atomic clock, precision is how well it measures the vibrations of atoms. Scientists talk about atomic clocks in terms of stability and precision. (The quartz in a watch oscillates at about 32,000 times per second, some 290,000 times slower than cesium atoms.) At the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the "official" second is 9,192,631,770 cycles of an atom of cesium. Every element has a characteristic frequency or set of frequencies, and since the atom "beats" billions of times per second such clocks are very precise. Atomic clocks keep time by measuring the oscillations of atoms as they change energy states. The first accurate version was built in 1955.
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