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Playing With Atomic Clocks At Home

Posted by kdawson on from the as-i-was-walking-down-the-street-one-day dept.

Wired is running a profile of the Time Nuts, a small group of people who buy surplus precision time equipment — cesium clocks for example — on eBay and keep really accurate time, because they can. The article quotes Tom Van Baak, who has outfitted a time lab superior to those of many small countries: "If you have one clock... you are peaceful and have no worries. If you have two clocks... you start asking, 'What time is it, really?'"

3 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Clearly.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > Besides, the only time that *really* matters down to the minute
    > is when you're trying to record a TV show

    Just because you have limited imagination..

    For example, when correlating long-baseline interferometer data
    from amateur radio astronomers there is ABSOLUTELY a requirement
    to have sub-millisecond accuracy.

    And that's just one example from recent experience.

  2. How to set? by russotto · · Score: 2, Interesting

    OK, as much fun as it would be to have my own stratum-1 NTP server, how do you (read: some ordinary joe, not a university researcher) synchronize these things to TAI in the first place?

  3. 'Time is an illusion... by jackpot777 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...lunch-time doubly so.'

    Ford Prefect. Which is very apt, because today is Mos Def's birthday.

    --
    Shiny. Let's be bad guys...