What is the Real Time?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It sounds like a simple question – what is the time? But look closer and you realise time is a slippery concept that scientists still do not fully understand. Even though we now have atomic clocks that can keep time to one second in 15 billion years, this astonishing level of accuracy may not be enough. The complexity of computer-controlled systems, such as high-frequency financial trading or self-driving cars which rely on the pinpoint accuracy of GPS, could in future require clocks that are even more accurate to ensure everything runs ‘on time’.
But what does that even mean? As Anand Jagatia discovers, time is a very strange thing. He visits the origins of modern time-keeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and meets scientists at the National Physical Laboratory who have been counting and labelling every second since the 1950s. He meets Demetrios Matsakis, the man who defined time and visits the real-life ‘Time Lords’, at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Paris to find out how they co-ordinate the world’s time and why the leap second is ‘dangerous’.
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hello, you're listening to the podcast edition of Crowd Science, first broadcast at |
| 0:08.2 | precisely 1132 GMT on Saturday the 28th of January 2017. I'm Anan Jagatier and this is the show |
| 0:16.6 | where we go to any lengths to answer your questions on life, the universe and |
| 0:21.2 | everything in between. |
| 0:23.6 | This week's question is from David Sutton in the UK. |
| 0:27.2 | My question for crowd science is, what is the real time? |
| 0:31.5 | I read the other day that we have atomic clocks that are accurate to one |
| 0:34.8 | second in 15 billion years, which begs another question, why can't we just make a clock that |
| 0:41.3 | simply gets time right. |
| 0:43.4 | And anyway, surely there's no such thing as true time. |
| 0:47.0 | So time must be what we say it is. |
| 1:05.1 | Okay, a question on the nature of time. That shouldn't be too difficult. One second in 15 billion years. Sounds okay to me, but it's not accurate enough for David. Well never fear here on crowd science we're not afraid to tackle the really big stuff. |
| 1:09.4 | So what's the time? That's a question we ask each other all the time. But what we don't ask |
| 1:16.2 | is why is that the time? How do we know that's the time? And where does the time even come from? |
| 1:22.0 | Let's start with a time signal that you'll all be familiar with here on the world service. |
| 1:26.7 | Hang on Annand. |
| 1:29.7 | You can't just play the Pips whenever you want. They're sacred and can only be played in full, that's all six Pips, on the hour. |
| 1:37.7 | Okay, sorry, sorry, producer Rami, I'll try to remember that. The Pips, or the Greenwich Time Signal, was first broadcast in |
| 1:44.7 | 1924, and it was sent here down a telephone line from the Royal Greenwich Observatory in |
| 1:50.2 | London. And that's really where the story of modern timekeeping begins. We are off to meet |
| 1:55.8 | the observatory's public astronomer Maric Kukula, slap-bang in the middle of a very famous |
| 2:01.3 | line. Maric, this is kind of incredible all of this. |
... |
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