Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

What actually is a clock?

Sure, it makes your school or workday go by pretty slow if you watch it.

It can get you up with an annoying noise in the morning. But what is it? Really?

That's what some researchers are trying to find out.

That's next.

Explore math mysteries in the Quanta book, The Prime Number Conspiracy, published by the MIT Press.

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In 2013, a master's student in physics named Paul Erker combed through textbooks and papers

looking for an explanation of what a clock is.

Albert Einstein famously said that time is what a clock measures. Erker hoped a deeper understanding

of clocks might inspire new insights about the nature of time. But he found that physicists hadn't bothered much

about the fundamentals of timekeeping. They tended to take time information for granted.

It was very unsatisfied with the way that the literature so far, especially in the quantum

regime, kind of dealt with clocks in the sense that normally a

single quantum system was considered to be a clock rather than what I would call the clock work,

something that you reference your ability to time keep to.

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