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when every time you had a power outage you had to go through this frustration
where you had to reset the time on your vcr and somehow no one in the house
could figure out how to do it no no no one else remember maybe i'm just getting
old anyway those days are mostly a memory now as gadgets like computers and
smartphones can set the time themselves
either because engineers thought it would be a useful feature or maybe
because they don't trust us to adjust the clocks ourselves after setting up
the vcr somehow became a meme like
before the internet but how exactly do they do this let's start out by talking
about phones which perhaps unsurprisingly receive a time signal
from the cellular network so you can easily check to see if this feature is
turned on here in Android and here in
iOS however if you're using a Windows pc
it's actually set by default to fetch the time every so often from an internet
time server pretty straightforward sounding right
but where exactly do these sources get their
time frame is there like a gigantic master clock somewhere that's even
bigger than big ben like kind of like the the linksys router for the internet
in south park that was an old episode too boy i'm getting old surprisingly the
answer is actually sort of most time servers and cell networks ultimately get
their time from atomic clocks because they are incredibly accurate thanks to
having virtually no drift for example if
you've got a cheap quartz wrist watch and you set it accurately you can expect
it to perhaps be off by a few seconds a month later it's not perfect but it's
not too bad but if you're building a clock that's supposed to be the standard
for millions of devices worldwide that just ain't going to cut it instead
atomic clocks work by you guessed it using the properties of
individual atoms to keep time so the us government's main pair of atomic clocks
called nistf1 and f2 use atoms of cesium
a metal that actually melts on a warm summer's day as their timekeeping
mechanism these atoms get bombarded with
microwaves which cause the electrons buzzing around these atoms to become
excited or to change energy states if you think back to high school chemistry
which boy was a long time ago for me and these state changes happen billions of
times per second in fact a cesium atom will oscillate a fixed number of times
every second this many exactly
because every atom of pure cesium 133 is
the same this electron jumping behavior
is very consistent and predictable to the point where the scientific
definition of a second isn't 1 60 of a
minute but rather the amount of time it takes a cesium atom to oscillate this
many times this consistency makes atomic clocks
extremely accurate so the nist f2 clock is accurate to one second in
300 million years so if you were to sync up your dvr to it you could still be
confident that it will record the super bowl at the right time in a few million
years when the nfl has finally given up on using roman numerals and the awesome
thing is that tapping into the power of these clocks is so easy if you're using
Windows your date and time settings actually has a spot for you to punch in
a network time protocol or ntp server
that will pull the time from an atomic clock or you can connect a little more
directly to the united states atomic clock system by selecting time.nist.gov
from the drop down menu meanwhile cellular networks often grab
the time from gps satellites which have their own built-in atomic clocks and
then pass them along to your phone and then if you're going somewhere where you
won't have service you can actually even download apps that can connect your
phone directly to the gps so that you can run on atomic time although
obviously this would be more of a battery hog finally surprisingly even
some traditional clocks and watches can receive special radio signals from
stations around the world that are dedicated to just broadcasting atomic
time but do remember that because of network latency and other types of
overhead the time on your pc phone or watch might not match the atomic clocks
exactly so the next time you show up 50 milliseconds late for work and your boss
is razzing you you can just you can just blame it on bad reception speaking of
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