The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
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What is the Great Space Race about?
This is Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office. It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what. To try and do that, we've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling and you get to see people everywhere making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hey, everyone. Regina Barber here with Emily Kwong and a story about time. Yes.
A tale about how time tells us our place in the world. So, Gina, are you familiar with longitude?
Yeah. So longitude is like the east-west position on Earth. It's relative to the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, England, right?
Yeah. The longitude there is zero degrees and extends by 180 degrees westward and 180 degrees eastward. And back in the 1600s, it was really difficult to calculate longitude. Right. a ship leaving port would set two clocks, one for the prime meridian and another for local time. So crews would update their local time as they sailed, calculating it by using the position of the sun.
And by knowing the difference between these two times, you can calculate, like, the in-between longitudinal degrees and know your location. Yeah, you can math. Right.
But the clocks aboard these ships were not reliable. Like, picture pendulum clocks on rolling seas, right? Surrounded by salty air and changes in temperature or barometric pressure. The clock parts are going to warp. All of this can ultimately cause the clock to stray from the correct time. We call this clock drift. Ooh, I like that term, clock drift. Yeah, clock drift is dangerous. Regularly throughout the 16 and 1700s, this accumulation of errors through ships so off course that it resulted in shipwrecks and lost lives, and merchants and seamen began calling for a scientific solution. So the British government created the Board of Longitude, and they announced a contest to solve this problem, the longitude problem.
Okay.
And out of that contest came the Marine Chronometer, a near frictionless pendulum that doesn't need to be reset as often and was therefore more precise.
Right. So fewer shipwrecks because now like ships knew the time and knowing the time let them know where they were.
Yes. Okay. This really made seafaring possible for the British Empire. So this clock changed world history. And I think history is repeating itself right now because many governments and companies are setting their sights on space exploration.
Right. I mean, so we're planning to go to Mars, maybe even further into space.
Yeah. And the hurdles that were kicking around during the era of the longitude problem are repeating themselves today. To navigate far from home, you need a really good clock.
That's why today on the show, space clocks. How scientists are pushing the envelope to build an atomic clock with even better precision. And what that could mean for addressing some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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