Stuff You Should Know - Atomic Clocks, Ahoy!

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

The only thing more complicated than an atomic clock is researching how they work and then figuring out how to explain it to other people. But believe us, they are fascinating. Even if you don’t care about clocks or atoms you’ll still like this episode.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Tamika D. Mallory. And it's your boy, Mike Saunders, General. And we are your hosts of TMI. And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect Network, breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture, and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for generations to come. Listen to TMI on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right. The Therapy for Black Girls podcast

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Take good care and we'll see you there. Hey everybody, we are coming to a town ostensibly near you, so putatively see us. That's right. May 29th we'll be in Boston, really Medford, Massachusetts. The next night we're going to go down to Washington, D.C., and then scooch back up to New York City at Town Hall on May 31st. 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. We're gonna start out where Chuck?

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. Yep, so you can get all the info you need and all the ticket links you need by going to 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 slash SYSK Live. We'll see you guys this year. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Jerry's back. 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. So everybody, Jerry's back in case you hadn't heard him. Yeah, and we're back from a break. I had spring break and there by you had spring break. You're welcome.

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Where'd you go? One of us gets a kid. We all get a kid. Yup. Uh, I went to Isle of Palms again for the first time in like four years.

Very nice. And, uh, it was great. It was good to be back. I love that place. Did you get arrested again? No, I never got arrested there. Yeah. What are you talking about?

I've never been arrested anywhere. I know. I just wanted to throw everybody off. Oh, okay. The casual listeners are like, Oh, Chuck got arrested before. Okay. Yeah. Dig it up people.

Let's see what it is. It doesn't exist. So, um, I am really excited about this one, Chuck. It'd been on my list for a while. I think I came across a top 10 list about like 10 weird things about atomic clocks that a House Stuff Works writer named Patrick Keiger wrote. Yeah. And I just had it on the list, but I hadn't really read it enough to know what was going on.

And it wasn't until I started digging into the research that I was like, these things are really interesting. And the idea of our modern world, you know, I sound like a frozen caveman lawyer, but it's true. Like everything from air traffic control to the internet to basically everything except talking to one another on cans connected by string. Right.

You can thank atomic clocks for it. It just simply wouldn't be possible without the atomic clock. 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. Right. You can't synchronize something unless everybody agrees on what time it is.

That's all an atomic clock is. It is very simply and we'll get into how these things work, which sounds difficult, but it's actually pretty simple still. It is the most accurate timepiece on planet Earth, and it is a self-correcting clock that uses old tech in a way, in the form of quartz crystals. Oh, you gave it away.

I mean, this is the first thing we're going to talk about probably. Quartz crystals, which is old tech, and it is constantly being checked and corrected using new tech in the form of the element CCM133. Yeah, very, very well put. So it's just a clock that sets itself. Yeah. Very often and accurately. 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.

It, it, it, um, it can drift essentially. You know what they say though? What do they say? Even the worst clock is, uh, correct twice a day. They do say that. Yeah. Um, so you mentioned quartz, right? I did.

That's a big deal. And what quartz is, if you've ever, I had no idea what Quartz was in a watch or a clock. I just had seen Quartz and you know. Quartz watch. It was like decades before I realized it wasn't a brand. They were saying, hey, there's Quartz inside. And what they're doing is boasting about how reliable their clock is.

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? Yeah, the movement of the gears would tick off seconds. How do gears work though?

Oh, we'll get into that in a different episode. Or you had a pendulum ticking off time, something like that. 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 like disfigure it. It called the piezoelectric effect. And after you, I guess as a result of that contortion,

it emits energy. It's like it's a way of saying uncle. And when it emits energy, it emits it at a really reliable frequency. And we figured out how to use that reliable frequency to tell time. And it's pretty nuts how 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. I think applying electricity to quartz to keep time is right up there with that kind of thing. Yeah, you mentioned it's a pizza electric material and we apply electricity to it just to affect it. Like you could bend cords or smack it

or flick it with your finger or something. Any kind of mechanical stress on it and it would do the same thing and it would produce an electrical charge that's gonna come out in pulses. And what those pulses do is they, in the terms of a clock or a watch, is they mimic the swinging of that pendulum. But in this case, like a pendulum ideally swings it once per second.

In this case, it's 32,768 pulses per second that that quartz crystal is emitting. And you talked about whacking it or something. It looks like, if you look at like the quartz they use, it looks like a little tiny tuning fork. Oh, Nito, I hadn't seen that. 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.

It goes, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. That's not what this is about. 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 the more little pulses or ticks that you have the more accurate within a second of time, the more accurate a clock is gonna be

and the development of the atomic clock has always been about just making that number as large as possible. And I guess we shouldn't reveal where we're at now, but it's in the matter of billions. Well, so if you start from the, say like an old grandfather clock, as a's in the matter of billions. 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? And we'll call that a tick. It ticks off a second by swinging from one side to the other. And if that pendulum is off just a little bit, say by a 10th of a second, right? Every 10 seconds, it's going to lose a second, right? Because it has far fewer things to tick off.'s going to lose a second. Right.

Because it has far fewer things to tick off. It has one tick per second. And like you were kind of hinting at with crystals, you have 32,000 plus ticks per second. So if it misses one tick out of like, if it misses a 10th of the ticks, that's far, far fewer, um, in total than it is to that one tick or that 10th of the ticks, that's far, far fewer, um, in total, than it is to that one tick or that 10th of a tick that the pendulum is missing. And so the more accurate the clock is, the more, um, it's what's called stable. 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. That's stability and that's the goal and that's why we started to turn to things like the atom, 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. Um, and that's kind of where we're at with atomic clocks. Yeah. And if, if you're wondering, you know, uh, in the terms of analog technology with watches and clocks, uh, they fall out of whack for a number of reasons,

because mainly because it's analog technology, like a spring gets weaker over time, uh, 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. But they can, quartz can gunk up a little bit because it's a naturally occurring thing, and we'll talk about where you find that in a minute. And temperature, atmospheric pressure, all of these things can throw even quartz out of whack

because it operates really well, basically at room temperature. But once you start applying really cold, like a watch in the really, really cold weather, an analog watch, or really, really hot hot weather Isn't gonna be as accurate. 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 and that was good enough But when we started going into space when we started launching satellites

certainly when the internet came online, we started using GPS to do things like, oh, A, get you places, B, bomb, unfortunately, bomb hopefully the right place from a satellite communication in a war. Being off a little bit can cost human lives and lose a lot of money in other cases. So accuracy and that stability was a really, really important goal to reach. Yeah, I found a really good kind of comparison of why that's so important, that accuracy. So like with quartz clock or watch, it might lose 15 seconds over 30 days, which is not bad If you're running a train schedule a quartz watch will do just fine, right? but if you're trying to like say land a

lunar lander on the moon If you're off by something like a millisecond, you might overshoot the moon by like a hundred and 300 or so kilometers, just by a millisecond. And a lander needs to be accurate within like 100 meters. So a millisecond off in your calculations can make you miss your spot by like 3000 times. That's not good at all. So that's why we need this kind of accurate stuff. And there's all tons of applications, like we'll talk about it later. But it just kind of goes to show 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. Yeah, I got one more for you. A microsecond even just a microsecond. An error in the order of a microsecond can be a 300 meter or about 320 something yards difference. So that's still a lot. Yeah, sure. So again, you need precision and people have been working for quite a while

now to make clocks as precise as possible. Do you want to like take a break and then start talking about the history of the atomic clock? I think so. I think that was, I mean, maybe one of our best setups ever between you and me. I don't want to get this out on the air, but this is just us talking. We'll edit that out.

All right, we'll edit that out, but I think we're on the right track. Okay. us talking? We'll edit that out. Alright, we'll edit that out, but I think we're on the right track. Okay, well we'll be right back everybody. Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa, but how much do you know about them from the ancient world? Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life. Greek myth and history is timeless and unless you've been living under a rock, you have seen just how true that is today. But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice.

I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and every week I bring you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories. I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archaeology and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today, and everyone in between. Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tamika DeMallory.

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or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers. So we have a physics, 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. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person.

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He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. He's a very important person. 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. That's maybe the 10,000 feet version of what atomic beam magnetic resonance

is. Yeah, and when we say we're going to say things like exciting atoms, that just means they're moving around. Yeah, so just, I guess we could toss it out real quick now. An atom has a ground state, which is its resting state and an excited state. And it can have multiple excited states, but it's either resting or in some sort of excited state or other, right? So Rabi was like, hey, this nuclear beam, I have a feeling you guys could make an atomic clock out of it. And everybody said, you guys, why don't you make it?

And he said, you go make it. I hecking dare you, was his famous quote. You do it. No, you do it. So, so somebody went off and did it. Yeah. 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. We did it, Rabi. And he's like, what are you talking about? He had terrible forgetfulness. Yeah. 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. So they were using like copper piping to heat it up and shoot it out.

It was compared to what we have today, very rudimentary. But it works pretty well as a proof of concept as in, hey, we can do this. But it was a little bit off. I think it was about a second every four months, better than quartz, but still not as good as we needed to get to. But again, it proved conceptually that an atomic clock was a thing that works better. Yes, for sure.

But what's strange about ammonia is it has a lower frequency so there's less ticks per second than the quartz crystal does. It has like 23,000 ticks per second, or 23,870 hertz, right? But like you said, they figured out that yes, you can use an atom to keep track of time, but they're like, we gotta find something better than that.

Let's try cesium. And in 1952- They were like, what? Yeah, exactly. I could not find anywhere why they decided on cesium. 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.

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. Well, I saw why they used it. You'll be glad to know. 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. Oscillation just means something that's moving back and forth at a regular rate. And it turns out that CCM13133 and when something is oscillating and when

you're speaking of like a clock or a timepiece that's called a frequency reference like you're literally referencing a frequency that needs to be steady and CCM-133 they found just was the most consistent frequency reference that they could find in nature. And that was important because 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. No, the only thing that humans have to do is to figure out how to excite it, and once you get it excited, it's going to do the same thing every time,

like I said, anywhere in the universe. Yeah. And then how to measure it. And those are like the advances in atomic clocks, figuring out how to more accurately measure cesium atoms once you get them excited. That's kind of like the advance. 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. The thing is is they started kind of advancing by leaps and bounds because with cesium, I think, do you want to go ahead and reveal like how many ticks cesium gives off every every second? I guess we should, huh? I think you should take it, man. All right, so it was 32,000 and change for quartz for that pulse CCM 133 oscillates at 9 billion 192 million 631 thousand and 770. Right. That's, I think we would all agree that's

quite a jump from 32,000 and change. It is, and like you said, oscillate is something that is just moving back and forth. It can also oscillate up and down, and if something oscillates up and down, what you're talking about is a wave. And if you put a bunch of waves together, you have a frequency, right? 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? Which I think in that sense is a hertz, whatever happens in a second is a hertz. That's the old slogan. 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. 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 passed by you in exactly one second. 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.

And the cesium atom said, I better get some money for this. Yeah. Like let's literally redefine what a second means based on this cesium 133. Prior to that, it was based on like, you know, the sun coming up and going down. It was a solar day. Right. So it was one eighty six thousand four hundred thousandth. Man, it's really hard to get my head around. One over 86,400 is the average length of a solar day, just that little fraction. So they said, let's just redefine it. And I think we should go through a little bit sort of the jumps that they made. Yeah, I agree.

Because this is all just kind of like, I mean, who cares about this? What people really want to know is how much more accurate was this stuff. In 1959, I believe that 1955 was the first cesium base clock, and then in 1959 they had an error rate of one second per 2,000 years. Five years later, it was a second every 6,000 years. It could lose or gain a second. Let me see, what's the next one? 1999, well, let's go to the mid 70s first. It was one second every 300,000 years.

And then finally in 1999, when they debuted the Cesium Fountain, which that's still what they're using today, right? Yeah, that's kind of the general state of the art. Although they're just still looking into new stuff, too. How much better do you need to get it though? They're getting it pretty good. So 1999, it became you could lose a second every 20 million years.

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. Right, 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. And so they figured out that if you hold strontium atoms in laser beams, form a lattice, you can basically hold them in place and measure them much more accurately.

And so that's what represented that crazy, amazing leap. 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. How can you possibly do that? It's a haughty claim. It really is, but they know how to back it up. So what they do is they'll compare the output of one strontium clock to another strontium clock and the difference, the biggest difference between the two,

they'll take that and say that that's the discrepancy, right? And because these things vibrate at such crazy, huge numbers per second, biggest difference between the two, they'll take that and say that that's the discrepancy, right? And because these things vibrate at such crazy, huge numbers per second, that the loss of one or two waves over a second, it just adds up to these crazy, huge numbers. So it lost one wave, essentially, for every 10 to the 10th power waves, which is like I think 10 billion waves, right? 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. That's how they do that. Amazing. Math is how they do it, I should say. Let's how they do that. Amazing. Math is how they do it, I should say. Let's give math its due for once. Yeah, all the maths, as they say in England. For sure. So we're gonna explain how this works now.

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. It could have been. But they still use quartz as part of this system. It's just, it's a feedback loop that starts with a quartz crystal and ends up with a quartz crystal.

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. Yes 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. And Chuck stepped up and was like, okay, let's not over explain this.

This is actually kind of a simple thing in concept. And you rescued me from sheer madness. It is our thing though. I had looked into the abyss and found atomic clocks just staring back at me. And it was something that you really rescued me from and I appreciate it. I want to say hats off to you. Well thanks, but we're not done. There's still a chance to over explain this into confusion.

Well then allow me to try that. Alright, take it away because it's all about this outermost electron, right? Yeah, yeah. So with cesium, I guess then the reason they selected cesium is because it has 55 electrons, 54 of them are so tightly locked in orbit around the nucleus that they basically don't get excited. That 55th outermost electron, though, it gets excited pretty easy, right? But it only gets excited when it's exposed to a frequency of electromagnetic radiation

at specifically 9,192,631,770 cycles or hertz. Or if you offered ice cream. It gets kind of excited, sure. But it may not fall out of its ground state. It depends. Is it Jenny's ice cream? Is it that like butter cake, gooey butter cake? It's gonna get excited from that one.

Is it just, you know, some dippy old, you know, Breyers that's been in the freezer for several months? Oh, I knew you were gonna say Breyers. Poor Breyers. No shade on Breyers, but if it sits there for a few months, it's gonna form ice crystals. Nobody, even the cesium atom's not gonna get excited by this.

Yeah, what was it in, did you see the Alfred Brooks movie Mother? Albert Brooks, and yes. What'd I say? I think you said Alfred Brooks, and 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's name, yes, because his brother was Super Dave Osborne, was Einstein. Albert Einstein was his name. No. Albert Brooks' name, yes,

cause his brother was Super Dave Osborne, Bob Einstein. Oh my goodness, yes, I forgot about that. But he obviously changed his name. But yeah, his movie Mother with a great Debbie Reynolds. Carrie Fisher's mom. That's right. Boy, we're just all over the place. There was a very funny joke about the ice crystals on the ice cream,

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. That is, so that's a good one. I feel bad for Fleishman from Northern Exposure, because he has to play such a jerk and he does it so well. Yeah. I saw an episode of that, a couple of episodes on our last tour actually. You know, Chuck, I think, have you seen the whole series?

I mean, I saw it back when I was a huge Northern fan, but then watched a couple. I watched the first two EPS when we were, I was in the hotel in one of our towns. And how did it hold up? You know, it held up pretty good for a show of that era. Okay, great. Fantastic. Did you like it? I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, I loved it. I was going to say, I think that the last episode was one of the best last episodes of any show ever.

I don't remember it. Oh, no. Okay, sorry. Not last episode. Fleishman's last episode. Oh, oh, oh. When he goes back to New York. Okay, I don't remember. Did he leave and the show continued? Yeah, for a little while. Yeah, see, I don't remember. Did he leave and the show continued? Yeah, for a little while. Yeah, see, I don't remember. This guy went when Steve Carell left the office,

I wasn't done. 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. And they got wackier and wackier as time went on, but that happens, especially when a show runner leaves too. How do we get sidetracked? I'm talking about the ice crystals. You're talking about, yeah, Mother. And by the way, I just wanted to give a shout out They got wackier and wackier as time went on, but that happens, especially when a show runner leaves too.

How do we get sidetracked? I'm talking about the ice crystals. Talking about, yeah, Mother. And by the way, I just wanted to give a shout out to the Alfred Brooks movie, Defending Your Life. That's so great. Far and away his best movie, if you ask me. There's a really good documentary on him

that's out now that Rob Reiner did, in case you're interested. Okay, cool. All right. 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? That's what it takes. And so what they figured out is that you can figure,

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, it's subject to frequency drift here or there. But if you, you can find out how far off or whether it's keeping reliable time by comparing it to the excitement of a cesium atom. If the quartz crystal is putting out the right frequency, the cesium atom will become excited and it will shoot off a photon. 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. The thing is Chuck, and this is where the madness lies for me, I don't understand how they take 32,000 and change, um, Hertz coming from the quartz crystal and translate that into 9 billion and change Hertz that excites the cesium atom. That's what I don't get. Do you get that?

That's what I don't get. Do you get that? 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. And then it's sending that correction via another electronic signal. I think it goes into what's called a detector. That's to me where the magic is. Cause I watched a bunch of videos, even kid science videos, and it just says it goes into the detector and then back out feeding into the quartz again.

Uh, I don't know what happens in that detector. I mean, it's detecting. Right. Yeah. I think they're actually tracking the photons. It's one of the beauties of it. And I think that's why they kept quartz crystal technology around us because it releases radio waves and we can read those really easily.

So that has that's one reason they kept quartz around. It keeps good time and we understand it really well. But so this is but this is where I'm thrown off. Like are they comparing the number of ticks that the quartz is giving off to the number of ticks that the cesium atom has given off and that same time span. And if the two match, then you know the quartz is still keeping good time. If it's off a little bit, then you know how much to adjust it because that cesium atom is not going to release any more waves than that number. It's just not. There's never going to be 771.

There's never going to be 769. It's always going to be that 9 billion number. 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. Is that what it is? I think that's the deal. And all that it does once it reads,

once those atoms are like, no, 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. Right, it punishes the quartz crystal from being off. In the form of a spanking. No, it's like that one guy who's being tested for ESP at the beginning of Ghostbusters.

It's like, no, not again. I mean, I think that's it. Great. Good night. So let's talk about the second a little more, because I think we kind of jump past it and I think it's worth including the actual definition, because it's so great. Yeah, what is it now, since the official change?

Yeah, so this is what they changed to in 1967. The second, they're talking about the second. Everybody who walks around is like, yeah, 60 seconds in a minute. This is the international definition of what a second is. It's the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.

By the way, everybody, this definition refers to a cesium atom at rest at a temperature of zero Kelvin. Yeah. Wow. So, but yeah, but you're like, okay, that doesn't really make any sense. But now that you understand how atomic clocks work, it does make sense. They're saying if you have something that is timed to this, you have a second. That's a second right there. Everybody's going to be on the same measure. That's why it's

the international standard. 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. Yeah, 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 We understood it a lot of the tech was built around it We've known how to work with it and repair things using it. So like they didn't want to Reinvent the wheel here. They just wanted to make that quartz run more perfectly. And it turned out it was, you know, sitting around in ore deposits in where what, Maine and South Dakota?

Yeah. And then where cesium comes from is pretty rare. Yeah. 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, clue-gee, 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. I just think that's pretty neat and ironic. Yeah, I mean, they've calculated that too, right? Because now we have what's called International Atomic Time, TAI.

It's one of those backwards... French things. Yeah, backwards French things. But now we can actually track using universal time and against the Earth's rotation and the fact that we're off because things can slow the Earth's rotation and you know the fact that we're off because you know things can slow the earth down. Space dust can, solar winds, atmospheric resistance, the moon you know and gravity tugging on the earth. So they can say now

that UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, is 30 seconds behind, uh, the TAI. Right. Which is pretty, pretty cool to be able to know that. Yeah. They're like, they're, they're keeping better track of the, the, um, spin of the earth than the spin of the earth is. Yeah. It's like, it's, it's crazy.

Like they figured out that the earth is slowing down by about two milliseconds each day, could not have done that when you're pinning the second to 1,86,400th of a solar day. You need atomic clocks to measure stuff like that. So I just think that's just fantastically neat. And they've done so many other stuff, or so many other things with this already too. I say we take a break and we come back and talk about some of the applications for timekeeping in an ultra precise way Let's do it

I'm Tamika D Mallory and it's your boy my son in general and we are your host of TMI New Year new name New Energy, but same old. And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect Network, breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for generations to come. But that's not all. We will also have special guests to add their thoughts on the topics, as well as break down different political issues with local activists in their community. If you like to be informed and to expand your thoughts,

listen to TMI on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right. Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odysseus, Cassandra, Medusa? But how much do you know about them from the ancient world? Let's talk About Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life. Greek myth and history is timeless and unless you've been living under a rock, you have seen just how true that is today. But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice. I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and every week I bring

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And many, many more. Join me on season three of Mini Questions on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers. So atomic clocks were a huge leap forward but they were very big at first. Obviously with all kinds of tech like this it just gets smaller and smaller. I think about 20 years ago they built an atomic clock that could be put upon a microprocessor It's crazy totally crazy 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 But you still need like, you know, one ring to rule them all. You need one clock to tell all the clocks what time it is. So the International Bureau of Weights and Measures averages all these atomic clocks that are operating in the world. Right.

It gives better weight to the ones that are really accurate. So if you got a gold star because your atomic clock in your lab is super accurate, you're gonna be more heavily weighted. If there's a lot of known pot users in your lab, they're not going to weight it as heavily. So well, ironically, we'll see here in a minute, comes from Colorado. But it is, then they're like, all right, this is the real time for the entire world. And then they message that out as what I mentioned earlier, international atomic time.

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. Yeah. Radio control clocks. Exactly, yeah. 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. So it's keeping accurate time because it's getting the information from radio WWVB, Radio Free Europe. Yeah, but that's the time that they're like, all right, this is what time it is on the internet, and that's what time all your trains are going to run and your planes are going to take off and land. Yeah. Although those are always going to be late.

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, but all of it is set to that agreed upon average of all those atomic clocks. Yeah, and so people have their own timekeeping stuff. Like if you have an iPhone or an 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, they're getting their information from the atomic clocks that are being maintained, at least in the US by the National Institutes of Standard and Technology. And then we also have to give a shout out to the US Naval Observatory. They started at first, and they still maintain

their own set of atomic clocks and they are the official timekeeper for the Department of Defense, but they're also the ones that you can call to get the accurate time. And in the United States, you can call 202-762-1401 and you will hear the voice of a man from the seventies who died in the nineties, who's still telling you

what time it is. He apparently spent several days, Fred Goldsmith I think. What's that number again? 202-762-1401. 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.

You could call and get time and weather in most places. All right, I'm glad to know that's a thing because I'm gonna do it from the phone that I know has all that information on it. So yeah, I was reading like a AARP article on it appropriately enough. I think the actor's name is Fred Goldsmith, right? Yeah, that's where I get a lot of this information.

No, no, no, but are you getting mailers yet? No, I found it on the internet. Okay, just wait until you get your first mailer. 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. Amazing. One of the other amazing things I saw is like, they just expected this to kind of go away once smartphones became so ubiquitous.

People just didn't need it anymore. Your phone is automatically communicating with your server, the time server for your phone company. Nope, in 2009, they actually started to see an increase in calls. So now people call more than they did in the early 2000s. Today, tell me movie phone is still around. I'm going to just quit my job and do nothing, but call those numbers.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what happened. 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? That's right. Oh my God, that was good. So classic, rate it R. Oh man, I watched the Puffy Pirate shirt episode the other day and it was, and it still holds up, yeah. All right, so we promised talk of GPS. I didn't have time to dig into what you sent. I watched the Puffy Pirates shirt episode the other day and it was, I mean it still holds up, yeah. All right, so we promised talk of GPS,

I didn't have time to dig into what you sent. So if you've got it together enough, can you explain briefly how GPS works? Yeah, so you mentioned that some atomic clocks can be fit under microchips now. And you can find those microchips aboard satellites that orbit space. And we have satellites that are dedicated to GPS, global positioning system, right? I actually found this, I got to give a shout out to Arpita Sarkar, who is just some random

person on Quora who- Did we hope got it right? Yeah. As long as they're not so masterful at mashing facts up and into lies essentially, but just covering it up perfectly, I'm pretty sure this guy got it right. 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. It has an onboard GPS receiver somewhere.

I don't know if it's in the Waze server or something like that. Maybe it's using your phone. It's probably using your phone. 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 time stamp that came from my own atomic clocks that I have onboard this satellite, right? 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, and then it does it again with another satellite and another satellite, usually two or three, 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, a hundred, 10 feet or 10 meters, I think, exactly where you are on planet earth, because it triangulates your location. And that's all thanks to atomic clocks. It wouldn't be possible to do that without atomic clocks.

Yeah. So, I mean, if you're ge if you're geocaching next time you get that Santana record out of the geocache, thank an atomic clock, thank cesium 133. Yep. Thank the good people of Maine. And, uh, North or South Dakota, one of them. I think it's South Dakota. Uh, was that a callback to like a 2009 episode? Is that what we said you could find in the geocache things?

Man, Chuck, that is a deep cut. 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. Or maybe not. Who knows? I'll bet there's some retro geocach, but I'm sure that's run its course. Or maybe not. Who knows? I'll bet there's some retro geocachers that are like,

I got the Santana thing going on. Yeah, I think I was saying geocaches. That's not work. I've heard people say that before, although maybe it was you from the episode in 2009. I've heard people say that. You're like, I heard some dummies say it. What else can you do with this stuff, Chuck?

I mean, I think that's a pretty good summation. Well, let me add, let me add one more thing. You it's been used in physics experiments too. It's vital in physics experience because you're tracking like say the decay of particles and atom smashers. And that happens so fast that you couldn't do it without atomic clocks because they're tracking things in the billions of a second, right? Pretty good stuff.

It's also been used more than once to prove Einstein's theory of relativity. atomic clocks because they're tracking things in the billionths of a second, right? Pretty good stuff. It's also been used more than once to prove Einstein's theory of relativity, that there's gravitational time dilation, depending on the, the effects of gravity on you and how fast you're traveling as in relation to the speed of light. Time's either going to move faster or slower for you. And so people have taken atomic clocks and put them at different

Elevations there was a very not even by much. No, I think 30 centimeters for one Experiment and it produced differences in time time dilation, but there's a really famous experiment called the half Lee Keating experiment in 1971 where they put some atomic clocks on experiment 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. It's very, very slight, but it's enough to prove that yes, Einstein's theory of gravitational time dilation is correct. Yeah, like that old thing that you will age faster living in the mountains than at sea level.

Yeah, that old chestnut. It is true, but I think what they found out was if you live in the mountains, it'd be about 90 billionths of a second less life over a 79 year lifetime. So everybody's like, why bother? Why bother even telling us that exactly. There's one other thing too. So we mentioned, um, oh, we didn't mention, I'm sorry. I left this out. Those GPS atomic clocks that they have on board, very, very precise.

They still get updates twice a day from back here on earth from those international timekeepers. Yeah. Just to make sure that the, the, the frequency drift hasn't taken over too much, it just updates them, right? You can't do that the further you get out from space. I mean, these satellites are only tens or dozens of miles above us, right? As we get further and further out into space,

it becomes harder and harder to communicate with Earth and to get updates about what time it is. So they're looking to build ultra precise atomic clocks that can go out in space on board spacecrafts that can keep their own time. They don't need any updating from back here on Earth. 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. Why haven't they done that yet? That was my sort of question.

Well they have harder. They have NASA launched the deep space atomic clock in 2019, which is like a test. Um, apparently it's going very well. Yeah. Okay. I was about to say, why don't they just, uh, throw one of those puppies aboard the spacecraft. But they, but they did. Um, and they, they're using mercury ions instead of cesium atoms or strontium.

Um, it's even better, right? 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 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 gonna mess with them a little bit. It's gonna mess with your measurement some With an ion you can keep it trapped in an electromagnetic field. It's not gonna mess with anything It's not gonna rub up against anything and so that's how it stays so reliable how it's your your measurements are gonna It stays so reliable, how your measurements are gonna stay reliable for a very long time, because they're not interacting with, you know, they're not bumping up against anything. Yeah, they're not slam dancing.

They're doing the Billy Idol. They're dancing with themselves. Speaking of slam dancing, I went to Circle Jerks and Descendants last week, and it was amazing. And there were people, there was a pit for sure. I hadn't seen one of those in a long time. And did you look down and Yumi was body surfing across the crowd? No, but she was into it. She was there for the descendants.

I was there for the circle jerks, but both shows were very good. And a fan came up and said hi at the show. I think I saw that on an email or something. Yeah, yeah. She emailed and was like, I'm sorry if it was like awkward or weird I was like it wasn't awkward or weird at all. Yeah, I'm sure it was wonderful, but it's a very good show and If you have a chance to see descendants and circle jerks, and you like punk go see it because it's awesome

It's very good still at it. I love it Yeah, if you want to know anything more about atomic clocks, you can find a whole rabbit hole to go down. See if you can escape madness yourself. In the meantime, it's time for Listener Mail. This is one that we've tried to get on recently. It's another Peanuts one, but this is a standout. Hey guys, Charles Schulz was a huge part of my childhood, though I never met the man. He spent a short amount of time living in Colorado Springs early in his career. While living there, he painted a mural on the nursery room in the house that had many early depictions of the Peanuts characters.

Years later, long after he moved out, my grandparents, Stan and Polly Trabnicek, bought the house. Over the years they heard rumors from neighbors that all the sheltered lived there and painted a wall. At this point the wall had been painted over several times. My grandma is an amateur painter, knew a thing or two about paint. So after lots of deliberating and researching she decided to try and remove the layers of paint over the mural bit by bit using cotton swabs. Way to go. Man, I love Polly Drabnicek for doing this because it would have been lost to time. Yeah.

The wall and all the characters were revealed. Many of my childhood memories involve that wall. My parents, my grandparents, sorry, would even give free tours of the wall to anyone interested. And this gets so great. Yeah. 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. So the estate coordinated to have that wall literally cut from the house, loaded onto a truck, and shipped to California. I will never forget that cold rainy fall day in Colorado. Was around nine or ten years old. The Schultz family treated my grandparents like cherished friends for years after that and even flew them out first class to be there for the opening of the museum. Mr. Schultz was a wonderful man, had an amazing family, and made the world a better place. And that is from Mike DeYoung. I saw pictures and it was really pretty unbelievable. You can Google this wall and look it up and I can't imagine the effort that his his

granny Trabnichek Nana Trabnichek. Nana Trabnichek put forth to tediously Meticulously expose that great work of art. Also Chuck She was researching this at a time where you had to go to the library to find stuff like this out. Sure. Could have ruined it. Yeah, oh, easily. It could have been like that Monkey Jesus art restoration thing.

Remember that? Uh-huh. Okay, and I also want to point out that the Schulz Museum flew them out first class back when first class actually meant something to you. Oh, burn. So yeah, there it is, the most triumphant, greatest peanuts email we received from that episode and we got a lot of good ones, but Mike DeYoung took the cake. So thanks for telling us all that, Mike. And hats off to Granny Nana Travnicek and the whole family and the Schultz Museum.

That was pretty cool stuff. If you want to get in touch with us like Mike did, we'd love to hear from you via email at stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The Black Effect presents Family Therapy, and I'm your host, Elliot Connick. Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently

co-parenting two young boys with her former partner, David. David, he is a leader. He just don't want to leave me. Well, how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship? Like, what's the blue part? David, you is a leader. He just don't want to leave me. But how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship? Like what's the blue part? David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to Family Therapy on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jon Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back

in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind. Listen to The Daily Show Ears Edition on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tamika D. Mallory. And it's your boy, my son, the General. And we are your hosts of TMI. And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect Network,

breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture, and politics, in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for generations to come. Listen to TMI on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right.