It controls computer networks, navigation tools and much, much more. It says when planes take off and land, when markets open and close, when schoolchildren arrive at class. The time from this lab is used to run our lives. "The management of what counts as correct time and what time it is in any given place is deeply related to authority," she says. She says this version of time is just the time the government wants you to think about. But theoretical physicist Prescod-Weinstein bristles at that definition. The ever-advancing NIST clock is one way to understand time. "In exchange for this wonderful idea," Sherman says, "you're now beholden to count forever and not lose track." The MAN in "time management" If you stop, if you blink, you don't know the time anymore. It's an impressive system, but there's a catch. In another room, that timing signal is sent out across the United States, and via satellite to other government laboratories in other parts of the world with clocks of their own. In some of the odder corners of the Universe, space and time can stretch and slow - and sometimes even break down completely.
Real time is actually something quite different. But Prescod-Weinstein says the time we're experiencing is a social construct. "A lot of us grow up being fed this idea of time as absolute," says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire. Humanity's ever-improving agreement on the time smooths communication and transportation, and it lubricates our economy.īut time has another side to it, one that the clocks don't show. It's fed through computer networks and cellphone towers to our personal gadgets, which tick in perfect synchrony.
NIST broadcasts the time to points across the country. It's never been easier to know what time it is. "It's OK, we only measure the nanoseconds," Sherman jokes. I rush across the campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and arrive at the end of a long hallway where physicist Jeff Sherman was waiting patiently. Scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology are developing ever-smaller and more accurate clocks.Īmerica's official time is kept at a government laboratory in Boulder, Colo., and according to the clock at the entrance, I was seven minutes behind schedule.
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