![]() ![]() You don’t care about accuracy if you only have one clock. The solution was the Gregorian calendar, which was invented in the 1500s but not adopted worldwide until the twentieth century. Synchronizing the daily clock and the annual clock was a terrifically hard problem: the mismatch between a tropical year and a 365-day year is small over the duration of a human life. ![]() That’s because of the second mechanical clock: Earth’s orbit around the Sun. When sunrises are getting farther apart, the weather tends to be getting warmer, so noticing this was useful for agriculture. The thing that’s easy to measure is the interval between sunrises, but that gets longer and shorter from time to time. The Earth’s spin rate is a good constant, but it’s tricky to measure directly. The atomic clock is man's latest step toward keeping an accurate track of time.For most of human history, we had a single mechanical clock: the spinning Earth. Rotation of the sun, locations of stars and the rise and fall of tides have all been used to help account for the passage of hours, though they weren't accurate enough to count minutes or seconds. Sundials and hourglasses can give an idea, but are something less than accurate. Over the ages, people have developed many methods and utilized many concepts for determining time. If you want your computer clock to be always accurate, you can download a program that will have your computer periodically check in for the official atomic time in your time zone. After all, computers know the time and date automatically, right? But remember that someone set that date at the beginning of the computer's life, and that you may even have adjusted the time for daylight savings time at some point. Most people tend to truly believe that computers are right. As is true with all atomic clocks, the atomic clocks in grandfather clock cases are periodically updated to be kept completely accurate. But more recently, the atomic clock works have been incorporated into grandfather clock cases. Some grandfather clocks no longer depend on the pendulum for timekeeping, making them more accurate. Because these clocks depend on the swinging of a pendulum to keep track of time, they are notorious for gaining time right after they're wound and losing time as the clockworks run down. ![]() Grandfather clocks are one of the most recent advances in atomic clock technology. Today, there are plenty of options if you're looking for accuracy without sacrificing beauty. The first few atomic clocks were very austere models, meant to be accurate time keeping devices and nothing more. There are several of those devices around the world, including on in Colorado that controls many of the US atomic clocks.Ītomic time keeping has been around for more than a half century, but it's only been over the past few years that the technology is generally available at a reasonable price to the public. ![]() When you choose an atomic clock, the clock's time is kept current through the use of radio signals between the nearest atomic time-keeping device and your clock. Generally, atomic time is considered to be the most accurate available. Very simply, atomic time measures the pulses and absorptions of electromagnetic waves. A more precise method of timekeeping is atomic time. But those rotations are very large and the potential for gaining or losing seconds is incredible. The most commonly recognized is based on the Earth's movement through space. So how do you know which is really correct? And at any given time, few of those clocks will show precisely the same time. From the watch on your hand to the grandfather clock in the living room, and from the alarm clock in your bedroom to the computer clock on your desk, most people have several clocks available. If you look around your home, you'll likely find several timepieces of varying sizes. ![]()
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