Meet the world’s director of time

An interview with Dennis McCarthy, who is the Director of the Directorate of Time (or was at one point; I’m not sure how his retirement and subsequent resurrection affected the job title)

Though the BBC filmed in the lab, none of that footage made it into the embedded clip. Perhaps there’s footage in the show that’s airing on BBC 2, as I type this. I’ll have to check it out.

More than anyone, Dr McCarthy appreciates the need for the world’s population to be synchronised. But for those who don’t spend their working day checking atomic clocks, why is knowing the time so important? Think for a moment about how the GPS satellite navigation system works.

There is a network of over 30 satellites orbiting earth that broadcast a high-precision time-stamp down to the GPS system in your car.

These signals travel at the speed of light, which is very nearly one foot every thousand-millionth of a second – or one nanosecond (for the more metrically minded, that’s around 30cm, which is far less elegant. If there is a God, he built the universe using imperial measurements).

If that last part is true, God has a hell of a sense of humor.

The was one part of the embedded video that made me cringe, and that was the depiction of the Bohr-ish atom (with wavy orbit lines — is that supposed to make it all better?) and the electron making a transition between them. But in that representation, those are the levels described by the principle quantum number, and the transition of microwave clocks is in the spin state of the electrons, oscillating between spin-up and spin-down (whose energy degeneracy is broken because of interactions with the nucleus, which also has spin, and thus a magnetic moment) And the notion that you’re looking at radiation emitted by the atom is true in an active maser but not a passive standard like a cesium or rubidium clock — in those you make a separate measurement of the atom to tell you what state the electron is in.

(I don’t know if it’s a permanent link, but in the “In Today’s Magazine” column there’s Call him Mr Time . Hence the title, though I can’t actually envision Dennis saying that to anyone)