Send Me To Sleep | Clocks (Voice Only)
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How does Andrew introduce the topic of clocks and time?
Hello, it's your host Andrew here. If you're enjoying Send Me To Sleep so far and you'd like to help support the show, the best way to do that is Send Me To Sleep Premium. Over there you'll get ad-free episodes as well as access to all of our bonus episodes. You can find a link to a seven-day free trial in the description notes. Thanks so much for listening and here's just a few ads before the show begins. I feel like clocks are really funny things and it's kind of a miracle that we as a human species ever managed to collaboratively figure out how to keep time. Because when you fundamentally think about creating a clock, it is a little bit counterintuitive and tricksy. Because if you think, I mean, imagine yourself trying to
invent the clock before any clock existed in order to do so in order to keep time in some way well you know first we're distinguishing between personal time you know our own subjective perception of time and whatever we might consider to be physical time so that might be the movement of the earth or the sun through the sky and i suppose this is why we create clocks in order to reconcile our subjective idea of time and the physical ideas of time around us but as i say if you need to produce a clock you'd need to first figure out some way of keeping a measure, keeping a rhythm, some sort of reliable beat that went on and on, like a metronome for which you could allot that rhythm. sort of singular, most basic measurement of time, which I suppose we call the second today with modern clocks.
Of course, you can get smaller than that and divide into milliseconds. But, you know, let's say you're trying to figure out what the second should be for a clock. Well, you need to find a regular rhythm. somehow and say you might look at a drop of water dripping from a leaky bucket and it seems to be fairly regular drip drip drip as it goes along and you look at this and you say well it seems regular but how do i actually know that this is regular how can i determine that this is accurate well, in order to determine that it's accurate, you would need some kind of clock. And so you see the problem therein, that ultimately you're never going to be able to completely accurately determine that something is hitting on a regular interval
I don't know whether you're aware, but modern clocks are usually, the modern second is based on the rotation of electrons around an atom, a cesium atom, I believe. It's a number of spins around an atom.
Why is creating a reliable clock described as counterintuitive?
I won't pretend to know exactly right, but this is the meaning behind the idea of the atomic clock. We base it on those fundamental particles, which we presume will keep regular time. um but of course we actually have no real way of knowing um and as such you know this this was a problem uh when initially creating clocks using uh very many varied methods um back when people were first trying to pin down this idea of time. And so you might have someone with a sundial, someone who has made a grandfather clock with gears, and even someone who has created a cesium atomic clock as well at the same time. And you set all those clocks, say, at exactly the same time and leave them going. After a while, you will find that they drift and they no longer tell anything.
the same time um after a day perhaps there'll be a minute out after a few days there'll be a few minutes out and keeping everybody's time the same uh was not only a huge challenge in the I believe it was the case long ago that, um, local time was a much more, um, uh, reasonable thing to, to keep. Um, and you, you would usually change to, uh, the, the, the location you happen to be in. And by which I mean, not just, uh, you know, time zone or country, but, uh, From town to town, you would simply set your clock to whatever the large clock in the square said. And so, you know, from a few miles down the road, even, you might vary in the time to your own watch. And these are just the... issues that we encounter when we are trying to grapple with the mechanisms of creating a clock with regular intervals using our own technology.
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