2 ms·
But we do have a timestick? Sort off anyway. The Caesium 133 atom turns out to oscillate at a very consistent frequency, effectively marking equidistant points
by contravariant 10y ago
But we do have a timestick? Sort off anyway. The Caesium 133 atom turns out to oscillate at a very consistent frequency, effectively marking equidistant points in time, similar to how a yardstick marks equidistant points in space.
- Koshkin 10y agoWell, the clock's precision plays a very little role here. Still, you are correct, a clock moving through time (while measuring it) is wholly analogous to having to move a yardstick through space in order to measure distance.
- GavinMcG 10y agoYou're right about the equidistance. But we can't measure that oscillation, or anything else that takes place in the dimension of time, without moving through it ourselves. That's what I was getting at with the yardstick analogy: we can plop a yardstick down and look at the number representing the length. We don't need to actually position ourselves at point 0 and move ourselves to point N. That's not the case with time – when we take a measurement, we must start at point 0 and actually move along the time dimension to the point at which the measurement stops. (As a teacher it's always so fun seeing how an example gets interpreted entirely reasonably in way other than you intended.)