[time-nuts] Us Time Nuts and... Wrist Watches.

Tom Van Baak tvb at LeapSecond.com
Fri Dec 24 21:36:19 UTC 2010


Steve,

After you're done chuckling, note that one man's "utterly
insignificant" is another group's passion.

A 6 foot person vs. 98 million miles is 6 / (9.8e7 * 5280),
or 1.16e-11, a unitless number that's well within our range
of expertise and fascination; neither utterly nor insignificant.

The number is half a day of a 10811 aging spec; a month
of rubidium frequency drift; a cesium in need of big C-field
adjustment; one microsecond per day; 0.1 Hz at 10 GHz;
the typical short-term peak-to-peak frequency stability of
a TBolt, etc.

To further appreciate the level at which we work & play, if
1e-11 is the ratio of a man standing compared to the sun,
then 1e-12 is about 6 inches (like waving your hands) and
1e-13 is about half an inch (like blinking your eyes).

/tvb

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Rooke" <sar10538 at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement" <time-nuts at febo.com>
Sent: Friday, December 24, 2010 12:05 PM
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Us Time Nuts and... Wrist Watches.


"Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is
an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended
life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital
watches are a pretty neat idea." - Dougles Adams, The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy







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