Time
Science has done it again. They've taken a perfectly normal concept, and pushed it to the bounds of unbelieveability. There was a happy time when a second was something that happened every 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of a day. And a happy time it was, when they cured smallpox and wrote Paradise Lost.
Then, as I understand it, the French Revolutionaries gave us the metric system, and decided that from here on out, seconds would be defined in terms of years. Never mind that, for the layman, there is no point whatsoever in relating seconds and years. They are different realms of experience, and even though you can say so-and-so many seconds are in a year -- why would you want to? Unless you're studying things that take a long time, and things that take a short time, and comparing them, it just doesn't come up.
Needless to say, that was considered insufficiently arcane. After a bunch of switches, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures now defines a second as
Seconds are a familiar concept, okay? They're a perfectly normal, human, everyday length of time. It's like science has conspired to turn the second into something as monstrous as possible. Caesium is a liquid metal that explodes on contact with almost anything. And at zero degrees Kelvin too, a temperature which it is actually not possible to reach. They couldn't use, say, a carbon atom at 72 degrees Fahrenheit?
I don't even know what "hyperfine" means. Whatever. It means scientists, as usual, are being irresponsible with our language. Look here:
Then, as I understand it, the French Revolutionaries gave us the metric system, and decided that from here on out, seconds would be defined in terms of years. Never mind that, for the layman, there is no point whatsoever in relating seconds and years. They are different realms of experience, and even though you can say so-and-so many seconds are in a year -- why would you want to? Unless you're studying things that take a long time, and things that take a short time, and comparing them, it just doesn't come up.
Needless to say, that was considered insufficiently arcane. After a bunch of switches, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures now defines a second as
the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.You can't do this to me, IBWM. Don't rearrange the referents behind my back. If I'm going to keep talking about seconds for the rest of my life, I would like to be talking about something where I know what the hell is going on.
Seconds are a familiar concept, okay? They're a perfectly normal, human, everyday length of time. It's like science has conspired to turn the second into something as monstrous as possible. Caesium is a liquid metal that explodes on contact with almost anything. And at zero degrees Kelvin too, a temperature which it is actually not possible to reach. They couldn't use, say, a carbon atom at 72 degrees Fahrenheit?
I don't even know what "hyperfine" means. Whatever. It means scientists, as usual, are being irresponsible with our language. Look here:
*Tick*That's a second. Somebody tell the IBWM.
posted by apk01004 at 1:36 PM
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