Time Travel Back to Last Wednesday

How We Got to Now: Time

My travel caused me to miss the original airing of this, and the site says it’s only active until the 30th. There’s a bit on the Naval Observatory and our (my) Rubidium Fountain Clocks at somewhere around the 45-minute mark, featuring our chief scientist.

A nit/peeve (from the intro to atomic timekeeping): atomic physics and nuclear physics are separate things. Even though we call it atomic power or an atomic bomb, it’s all nuclear processes. The physics behind atomic clocks is not really tied, except at a fairly superficial level, to that of bombs.

Don't Tell Me My Love is Wrong!

Doing Elitism Wrong

This kind of cheap, lazy elitism ticks me off. It says nothing about why science is hard to understand, and it doesn’t even get the frustrations of the job right. I mean, “collecting data”? “Dense research articles”? Neither of those necessarily implies tedium or drudgery. Shockingly, not everything which requires patience and concentration is unpleasant.

I’ve heard the remark from a colleague that 80% of what we do is mundane, but we do that because 20% is really, really neat. (YMMV). One needs to acknowledge that science is not alone in this — professional (or other top-level) athletes, for example, spend more time practicing than they do playing the game. It’s all part of the larger picture. And, as Blake points out, who’s to say what is tedium or drudgery?