Get emotional with me. Radhi Devlukia in my new podcast, a really good cry. We're gonna be talking with some of my best friends.

I didn't know we were gonna go there.

I've been at this. People that I admire. When we say, listen to your body, really tune into what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right? Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to a really good cry with Radhi Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The black effect presents family therapy. And I'm your host, Elliot. Connie Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently co parenting two young boys with her former partner, David.

David, he is a leader. He just don't want to lead me.

But how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship? Like, what's the blue part?

David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to family therapy on the Black effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, everybody, we are coming to a town ostensibly near you so putatively see us.

That's right. May 29. We'll be in Boston. Really? Medford, Massachusetts. The next night, we're gonna go down to Washington, DC, and then scooch back up to New York City at town hall on May 31.

Yeah. And if you're one of those people who likes to plan way far in advance, then you can go ahead and get tickets for our shows in August. We're going to start out where Chuck?

We're going to be in Chicago August 7, Minneapolis August 8, then Indianapolis for the very first time on August 9. And then we're going to wrap it up in Durham, North Carolina, and right here in Atlanta on September 5 and September 7.

Yep. So you can get all the info you need and all the ticket links you need by going to stuffyou should know.com and hitting that tour button. Or you can also go to Linktree Sysklive. We'll see you guys this year.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. And Jerry's back. We don't know if you guys do or not, but Jerry's back because. Yeah, guest producer Ben was sitting in for a while, and now Jerry's back. So, everybody, Jerry's back. In case you hadn't heard.

Yeah. And we're back from. From a break. I had spring break. And thereby you had spring break. You're welcome.

Yeah. Thanks a lot. Where'd you go?

One of us gets a kid, we all get a kid.

Yep.

I went to isle of palms again for the first time in, like, four years.

Very nice.

And it was great.

It's good to be back.

I love that place.

Did you get arrested again?

No, never got arrested there.

Yeah. What are you talking about?

I've never been arrested anywhere.

I know. I just wanted to throw everybody off.

Okay.

The. The casual listeners are like, oh, Chuck got arrested before. Okay.

Yeah, dig it up, people. It doesn't exist.

So, um, I am really excited about this one, Chuck. It's been on my list for a while. Uh, I think I came across a top ten list about, like, ten weird things about atomic clocks. That how stuff works? Writer named Patrick Kiger wrote.

Yeah.

And I just had it on the list, and I. But I hadn't really read it enough to know what was going on. And it wasn't until I started digging into the research that I was like, these things are really interesting. And the idea of our modern world. You know, I sound like frozen caveman lawyer, but it's true. Like, everything from air traffic control to the Internet to basically everything except talking to one another on cans connected by string. You can thank atomic clocks for it just simply wouldn't be possible without the atomic clock.

Yeah. And by saying that, what you're saying is, and we'll dig into this more later, is that the world. For everything to operate correctly in a tech forward world, it has to be synchronized.

Right.

And you can't synchronize something unless everybody agrees on what time it is. And that's all an atomic clock is. It is very simply. And we'll get into how these things work, which sounds difficult, but it's actually pretty simple still. It is the most accurate timepiece on planet Earth, and it is a self correcting clock that uses old tech, in a way, in the form of quartz crystals.

Oh, you gave it away.

First thing we're going to talk about probably quartz crystals, which is old tech, and it is constantly being checked and corrected using new tech in the form of the element CCM 133.

Yeah. Very, very well put clock that sets.

Itself very often and accurately.

Yeah. Because everybody who's ever had any experience with a clock or a watch or something like that knows that it can gain or lose time. It can drift, essentially.

You know what they say, though?

What do they say?

Even the worst clock is correct twice a day.

Yeah, they do say that. Yeah. So you mentioned quartz, right?

I did.

That's a big deal. And what quartz is, if you've ever. I had no idea what quartz was in a watch or a clock. I just had seen quartz and, you know, Quartz watch. It was like, decades before I realized it wasn't a brand that they were saying, hey, there's quartz inside. And what they're doing is boasting about how reliable their clock is, because when we used to, we used to use things like mechanical stuff, like springs that you would wind that would power a bunch of gears, and that would kind of.

Gears.

Yeah. The movement of the gears would tick off seconds. Right.

How do gears work, though?

Oh, we'll get into that in a different episode. Right. Or you had a pendulum ticking off time, something like that. And then when we moved to quartz, what quartz does is it ticks off time as well, because we figured out at some. I don't know who tried this first, but if you apply an electrical current to quartz, you mechanically, like, disfigure it. It called the piezoelectric effect. And after you, I guess as a result of that contortion, it emits energy. It's like. It's a way of saying uncle. And when it emits energy, it emits it at a really reliable frequency. And we figured out how to use that reliable frequency to tell time. And it's pretty, pretty nuts how complicated clocks are. And just how it kind of, to me, falls in line with that Arthur C. Clarke quote that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic. I think applying electricity to quartz to keep time is right up there with that kind of thing.

Yeah, you mentioned it's a pizza, electric material. And, you know, we apply electricity to it just to affect it. Like, you could. You could bend cords or smack it or flick it with your finger or something, any kind of mechanical stress on it, and it would do the same thing, and it would produce an electrical charge that's going to come out in pulses. And what those pulses do is they, in the terms of a clock or a watch, is they mimic the swinging of that pendulum. But in this case, like, a pendulum ideally swings it once per second. In this case, it's 32,768 pulses per second that that quartz crystal is emitting. And you talked about whacking it or something. It looks like if you look at, like, the quartz they use, it looks like a little tiny tuning fork.

Oh, nito, I hadn't seen that, yeah.

It'S just a little, itty bitty, tiny tuning fork. And just like you would whack a tuning fork and it would, you know, whatever a tuning fork does, it goes, that's not what this is about. But that quartz does the same thing. And we'll come back to that 32,768 pulses per second a few times. Because the whole idea with the development, and as we get into history here of the atomic clock is the more little pulses, or ticks, that you have, the more accurate, within a second of time, the more accurate a clock is going to be. And the development of the atomic clock has always been about just making that number as large as possible. And I guess we shouldn't reveal where we're at now, but it's in the matter of billions.

Well, so if you start from, say, like an old grandfather clock, as a pendulum swings from one side to the other, that's a second, right? And we'll call that a tick. It ticks off a second by swinging from one side to the other. And if that pendulum is off just a little bit, say, by a 10th of a second, right, every 10 seconds, it's going to lose a second, right, because it has far fewer things to tick off. It has one tick per second. And like you were kind of hinting at, with crystals, you have 32,000 plus ticks per second. So if it misses one tick out of, like, what if it misses a 10th of the ticks, that's far, far fewer in total than it is to that one tick or that 10th of a tick that the pendulum is missing. And so the more accurate the clock is, the more it's what's called stable. And that's the goal of super precise clocks, stability, which is it's going to measure a second exactly the same now as it will 10,000 years from now. That's stability. And that's, that's the goal. And that's why we've started to turn to things like the atom, which if we can figure out how to measure the atom accurately, it's going to, it's going to release x number of ticks every time anywhere in the universe if we can measure it when it's excited.

And that's kind of where we're at with atomic clocks.

Yeah. And if, if you're wondering, you know, in terms of analog technology, with watches and clocks, they fall out of whack for a number of reasons, because mainly because it's analog technology, like a spring gets weaker over time, gears can come out of balance. Even when it comes to crystals, like, when they got the quartz crystal involved, that was pretty good, like 32,768 pulses per second. Like, that's not too bad at all. Uh, but they can, uh, quartz can gunk up a little bit, um, because it's a naturally occurring thing. And we'll talk about where you find that in a minute. Uh, and temperature, uh, atmospheric pressure, all of these things can throw even quartz out of whack.

Right.

Because it operates really well, you know, basically at room temperature. Um, but once you start applying, you know, uh, really cold, like a watch in the really, really cold weather, an analog watch or really, really hot weather isn't going to be as accurate. So all of these things, again, for many, many, many hundreds of years, all this stuff was fine because they just needed to tell time and get it pretty darn close. And that was good enough. But when we started going into space, when we started launching satellites, certainly when the Internet came online, we started using gps to do things like, oh, a, get you places, b, bomb, unfortunately, bomb, hopefully the right place from a satellite communication. In a war, being off a little bit can cost human lives and lose a lot of money in other cases. So accuracy and that stability was a really, really important goal to reach.

Yeah, I found a really good kind of comparison of, you know, why that's so important, that accuracy. So, like with quartz clock or a watch, it might lose 15 seconds over 30 days, which is not bad. If you're running a train schedule, a quartz watch will do just fine. Right. But if you're trying to, like, say, land a lunar lander on the moon, if you're off by something like a millisecond, you might overshoot the moon by like 100, 200 miles, 300 or so kilometers, just by a millisecond. And a lander needs to be accurate within like 100 meters. So a millisecond off in your calculations can make you miss your, your spot by like 3000 times. That's not good at all. So that's why we need this kind of accurate stuff. And there's all tons of applications, like, we'll talk about it later. But it just kind of goes to show, like, just how vital time is when you start using it as a factor in really heavy formulas, which are the kind of formulas they use to land landers on the moon. The heaviest.

Yeah, I got one more for you. A microseconds, even just a microsecond, an error in the order of a microsecond can be a 300 meters or about 320, something yards difference. So that's still a lot.

Yeah, sure. So, again, you need precision, and people have been working for quite a while now to make clocks as precise as possible. Do you want to, like, take a break and then start talking about the history of the atomic clock?

I think so. I think that was. I mean, maybe one of our best setups ever. If, between you and me, I don't want to get this out on the air, but.

Okay.

All right, this is just us talking.

We'll edit that out. All right.

We'll edit that out, but I think we're on the right track.

Okay, well, we'll be right back, everybody. Selfish. No.

Get emotional with me, Radhi Devlukia, in my new podcast, a really good cry. We're going to talk about and go through all the things that are sometimes difficult to process alone. We're going to go over how to regulate your emotions, diving deep into holistic personal development and just building your mindset to have a happier, healthier life. We're gonna be talking with some of my best friends.

I didn't know we were gonna go there on this.

People that I admire, when we say, listen to your body, really tune into what's going on. Authors are books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right. And basically have conversations that can help us get through this crazy thing we call life. I already believe in myself. I already see myself. And so when people give me an opportunity, I'm just like, oh, great, you see me, too. We'll laugh together, we'll cry together, and find a way through all of our emotions. Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to a really good cry with Radi Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Ilya Carney, and this is family therapy.

My best hopes, I guess.

Identify the life that I want and work towards it.

I never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of.

I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true?

That's true, and I'm not offended by that.

Thank you for going through those things, and thank you for overcoming them.

Thank God for the limits.

Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions, be positive. It just keeps me going.

I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now.

So how'd we do today.

We did good.

The Black Effect presents family therapy. Listen now on the Black effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Tameka D. Mallory, and it's your.

Boy, my son in general.

And we are your hosts of TMI new year, new name, new, new energy, but same old. And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect network, breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for generations to come. But that's not all. We will also have special guests to add their thoughts on the topics, as well as bring break down different political issues with local activists in their community. If you like to be informed and to expand your thoughts, listen to TMI on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

That's right. So we have a physics, very famous physics professor named Isadore Rabbi who turned down the job of being Oppenheimer's, like, right hand man at Los Alamos for the Manhattan project. Instead went off into his own thing. And one of the things he developed is he discovered nuclear magnetic resonance, and he figured out that's used in, like, the wonder machine, the MRI. That's how it does its thing. He figured out how to train that into, or how to use it to great effect in what's called an atomic beam magnetic resonance, which essentially is a way to trap and push around and excite atoms that you want to specifically mess with. That's maybe the 10,000ft version of what atomic beam magnetic resonance is.

Yeah. And when we say, we're going to say things like exciting atoms, that just means they're moving around.

Yeah. So just. I guess we could toss it out real quick. Now that an atom has a ground state, which is its resting state, and an excited state, and it can have multiple excited states, but it's either resting or in some sort of excited state or other. Right. So Rabbi was like, hey, this, this nuclear beam, I have a feeling you guys could, could make an atomic clock out of it. And everybody said, you guys, why don't you make it? And he said, you go make it. I heckin dare you, was his famous.

Quote, you do it. No, you do it.

So somebody went off and did it. Yeah, I think within four years, the National Bureau of Standards, which is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, they said, we've got this. We did it, Rabbi. And he's like, what are you talking about? He had terrible forgetfulness.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They said we built the first atomic clock, and this is the earliest version, used ammonia as the molecule and the source of the vibrations. So, uh, they were using, like, copper piping to heat it up and shoot it out. It was, compared to what we have today, very rudimentary, but it worked pretty well as a proof of concept, as in, hey, we can, we can do this. But it was. Was a little bit off. Uh, I think it was about a second every four months. Better than quartz, but still not as good as we needed to get to. But again, it proved conceptually that an atomic clock was a thing that works better.

Yes, for sure. But what's strange about ammonia is it has a lower frequency, so there's less ticks per second, uh, than the quartz crystal does. It has, like, 23,000, um, ticks per second, or 23,870 hz. Right. But like you said, they figured out that, yes, you can use an atom to keep track of time, but they're like, we got to find something better than that. Um, let's try cesium. And in 19. Yeah, exactly. I could not find anywhere why they decided on cesium. I know it's, like, neutral, and maybe it's like it only. Maybe because it only does have two states, either ground or excited. Um, I'm not exactly sure why, but it's a really weird element, and it's difficult to work with, um, especially at, like, room temperature, because it can just suddenly catch fire if it wants to.

Well, I saw why they used it, you'll be glad to know. Well, all of this stuff has to deal with oscillation, which is basically whether it's a pendulum swinging or that spring moving the gears, oscillation just means something that's moving back and forth at a regular rate. And it turns out that CCM 133 and when something is oscillating, when you're speaking of, like, a clock or a timepiece, that's called a frequency reference. Like, you're literally referencing a frequency that needs to be steady. And CCM 133, they found, just was the most consistent frequency reference that they could find in nature. And that was important because using something natural meant that humans all of a sudden were taken out of the equation for the first time, which was a breakthrough because its like, this stuff is consistent till the cows come home and human hands aren't making it.

So, no, the only thing that humans have to do is to figure out how to excite it. And once you get it excited, it's going to do the same thing. Every time, like I said, anywhere in the universe. And then how to measure it. And those are like the advances in atomic clocks, figuring out how to more accurately measure cesium atoms. Once you get them excited, that's kind of like the advance. Once they figured out how to excite cesium and then how to measure it, they had the first atomic clock all the way back in 1952. The thing is, they started kind of advancing by leaps and bounds, because with cesium, I think. Do you want to go ahead and reveal, like, how many ticks cesium gives off every second?

I guess we should, huh?

I think you should take it, ma'am.

All right, so it was 32,000 and change for quartz. For that pulse, cesium 133 oscillates at 9,192,631,770.

Right.

That's. I think we would all agree that's quite a jump from 32,000 and change.

It is. And like you said, oscillate is something that is just moving back and forth. It can also oscillate up and down. And if something oscillates up and down, what you're talking about is a wave. And if you put a bunch of waves together, you have a frequency, right? If you. If you have. If you have a point in space that you are detecting a wave passing and you count how many pass in 1 second, you're tracking the frequency of that wavelength. Right? Which I think, in that sense, is a hertz. Whatever happens in a second is a hertz. That's the. That's the old slogan.

Yeah.

And so if you were. If you could see the. The waves coming off of a cesium atom as it returns back to its ground state, it got really excited, and. And it shoots off a photon. And the photon itself has waves where if you could. If you could just stand still and watch it pass and count the waves, you would count 9,192,000,631. 770 waves pass by you in exactly 1 second. And it became so clear that you could literally set your watch to this kind of thing, if you could figure out how to measure it, that back in 1967, the international community said, let's just attach the second to the cesium atom.

Yeah.

And the cesium atom said, I better get some money for this.

Yeah. Like, let's literally redefine what a second means based on this. Cesium 133. Prior to that, it was based on, like, you know, the sun coming up and going down. It was a solar day, right? So it was 186, 400,000th man, that's really hard to get my head around.

For sure.

One over 86,400 is the average length of a solar day. Just that little fraction. So they said let's just redefine it. And I think we should go through a little bit sort of the jumps that they made.

Yeah, I agree, because this is all.

Just kind of like, I mean, who cares about this? What people really want to know is how much more accurate was this stuff in 1959? I believe the 1955 was the first cesium base clock. And then in 1959 they had an error rate of 1 second per 2000 years. Five years later it was second. Every 6000 years. It could lose or gain a second. Let me see, what's the next 119 99? Well, let's go to the mid seventies. First it was 1 second every 300,000 years. And then finally in 1999 when they debuted the cesium fountain, which that's still what they're using today, right?

Yeah, that's kind of the general state of the art, although they're just still looking into new stuff too.

How much better do you need to get it though?

They're getting it pretty good.

So 1999 it became you could lose a second every 20 million years.

Wow.

And then by 2013 they said we can actually go back in time and say that using this method, we have not lost a second since the big bang.

Right. So that last one you mentioned is a strontium lattice clock, which is, again, we just talked about, once we figure out how to measure the vibration of an atom, once it's excited and returns to its ground state, it's just a question of becoming better and better at measuring it. And so they figured out that if you hold strontium atoms in laser beams, form a lattice, you can basically hold them in place and measure them much more accurately. And so that's what represented that crazy amazing leap. And I was trying to figure out, like, how can they say, like, this thing would not have lost a second since the beginning of the universe? How can you possibly do that?

Haughty claim it really is, but they.

Know how to back it up. So what they do is they'll compare the output of one strontium clock to another strontium clock, and the difference, the biggest difference between the two, they'll take that and say that that's the discrepancy, right. And because these things vibrate at such crazy huge numbers per second that the, like the loss of like one or two waves over a second, it just adds up to these crazy huge numbers. So it lost one wave essentially, for every ten to the 10th power waves, which is like, I think, 10 billion waves. Right. So when you start adding that up to the number of seconds in a day, in a year, in a century, you suddenly realize, like, okay, this thing is not going to lose a second for, you know, 15 billion years. That's how they do that amazing math is how they do it, I should say. Let's give math its due for once.

Yeah. All the maths, as they say in England, for sure. So we're going to explain how this works now. Kind of the remarkable surprise of it all is that these things, and I guess it's not much of a surprise because I mentioned it at the very beginning, it could have been, but they still use quartz as part of this system. It's just. It's a feedback loop that starts with a quartz crystal and ends up with the quartz crystal. And in between this, science voodoo happens that just is all about self correcting as it feeds back into that quartz crystal to be, you know, shot back out again in the form of microwaves.

Yes. And I'm glad that you really kind of stepped up and took charge here, because when we're researching, we'll send, like, you know, especially day of stuff. We'll send just, like, little last minute details or maybe better explanations of something that we have when we're researching. And Chuck stepped up and was like, okay, let's not over explain this. This is actually kind of a simple thing in concept. And you rescued me from. From sheer madness.

It is our thing, though.

I had looked into the abyss and found atomic clocks just staring back at me, and it was. It was something that you really. You really rescued me from it, and I appreciate it. I want to say hats off to you.

Well, thanks, but we're not done.

Oh, God.

Like, there's still a chance to over explain this into confusion.

Well, then allow me to try that.

All right, take it away. Cause it's all about this outermost electron, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So with cesium, I guess, then the reason they selected cesium is because it has 55 electrons. 54 of them are so tightly locked in orbit around the nucleus that they basically don't get excited.

Yeah.

That 55th outermost electron, though, it gets excited pretty easy, right? Right. But it only gets excited when it's exposed to a frequency of electromagnetic radiation at specifically 9,192,000,631 and 770 cycles, or.

Hertz, if you offered ice cream.

It gets kind of excited. Sure.

Yeah.

But it may not fall out of its ground state. It depends is it Jenny's ice cream? Is it that like butter cake? Gooey butter cake. It's going to get excited from that one. Is it just, you know, some dippy old, you know, Briars that's been in your freezer for several months? No shade on Briars, but if it sits there for a few months, it's going to form ice crystals. Nobody, even the cesium. Adam's not going to get excited by this.

Yeah. What was it in? Did you see the Alfred Brooks movie? Mother?

Albert Brooks and. Yes.

What'd I say?

I think you said Alfred Brooks and I think that's his butler.

Well, no, but. Well, now that we're off on this track, you know, their original name was Einstein. Albert Einstein was his name. No, Albert Brooks's name. Yes, because his brother was super Dave Osborne. Bob Einstein.

Oh, my goodness. Yes. I forgot about that.

Obviously changed his name. But yeah, his movie mother with the great Debbie Reynolds.

Carrie Fisher's mom.

That's right. Boy, we're just all over the place. There was a very funny joke about the ice crystals on the ice cream and I can't remember what she called it, but something like a protective barrier or something that it forms, like to really preserve the ice cream underneath.

That is so. That's a good one. I feel bad for Fleischmann from northern exposure because he has to play such a jerk and he does it so well.

Yeah, I saw an episode of that, a couple of episodes on our last tour, actually.

You know, Chuck, I think. Have you seen the whole series?

I mean, I saw it back when I was a huge northern fan, but then watched a couple. I watched the, the first two EPs when we were, I was in the hotel in one of our towns.

And how did it hold up?

You know, it held up pretty good for a show of that era.

Okay, great. Fantastic. Did you. Glad to hear that. Yeah, I loved it. I was going to say, I think that the last episode was one of the best last episodes of any show ever.

I don't remember it or.

No. Okay, sorry, not last episode. Fleischman's last episode. Oh, oh, when he goes back to New York.

Okay. I don't remember. Did he leave and the show continued?

Yeah, for a little while.

See, I don't remember this guy. When Steve Carell left the office, I was done.

Yeah, his last. There was some moments of brilliance in there in the office after Carell left, but it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't reliably great every single episode.

Yeah.

And they got wackier and wackier as time went on. But that happens, especially when a showrunner leaves, too.

How do we get sidetracked? I'm talking about the ice cream.

Yeah, mother. And by the way, I just wanted to give a shout out to the Alfred Brooks movie, defending your life.

Oh, so great.

Far and away is best movie, if you ask me.

There's a really good documentary on him that's out now that Rob Reiner did, in case you're interested.

Okay, cool. All right, so we're back to cesium, and I was saying that it gets excited at that same frequency that it emits a photon at. That's what it takes. And so what they figured out is that you can figure. You can find out if your quartz crystal oscillator, the thing that you're using to keep time with, it's super reliable, but again, it gets subject to frequency drift here or there. But if you. You can find out how far off or whether it's keeping reliable time by comparing it to the excitement of a cesium atom. If. If the. If the quartz crystal is putting out the right frequency, the cesium atom will become excited, and it will shoot off a photon. And if enough of them do that in this atomic clock, this gas chamber, essentially, that they have, then you know that your quartz crystal is keeping the right time because it's emitting the right number of pulses itself. The thing is, Chuck, and this is where the madness lies for me. I don't understand how they take 32,000 and change Hertz coming from the quartz crystal and translate that into 9 billion and change hertz.

That excites the cesium atom. That's what I don't get. Do you get that?

Well, the way I understood it is that those two things are working independently. Like, the. The cesium is doing its thing at 9 billion plus Hertz, okay. Just to get a more accurate measurement. And then it's sending that correction via another electronic signal. I think it goes into what's called a detector. That's, to me, where the magic is, because I watch a bunch of videos, even kid science videos, and it just says it goes into the detector.

Yeah.

And then back out, feeding into the quartz again. Right. I don't know what happens in that detector. I mean, it's detecting.

Right? Yeah. I think they're actually tracking the photons. It's one of the beauties of it. And I think that's why they kept quartz crystal technology around, is because it releases radio waves, and we can read those really easily. So that has. That's one reason they kept quartz around. It keeps good time, and we understand it really well. But. So this is. But this is where I'm thrown off. Like, are they comparing the number of ticks that the quartz is giving off to the number of ticks that the cesium atom is given off and that same time span. And if the. If the two match, then, you know, the quartz is still keeping good time. If it's off a little bit, then you know how much to adjust it, because that cesium atom is not going to release any more waves than that number. It's just not. There's never going to be 771. There's never going to be 769. It's always going to be that 9 billion number. So I guess if you compare how many the crystal, which can have more or less over time, depending on how well it's functioning, if you compare those two, then you know that your quartz clock is keeping fully accurate time.

Is that what it is?

I think that's the deal. And all that it does, once it reads, once those atoms are like, no, you're actually off a little bit. I think it just tweaks that original electric current in the feedback loop feeding back into the quartz.

Right. It punishes the quartz crystal in the.

Form of a spanking.

No, it's like that. That one guy who's being tested for ESP at the beginning of Ghostbusters.

I mean, I think that's it.

Great. Good night. So let's talk about the second a little more, because I think we kind of jumped past it. And I think it's worth, um, including the actual definition, because it's so great.

Yeah. What. What is it now? Since the official change?

Yes. So this is what they changed to in 1967. The second they're talking about the second, every. Everybody who walks around is like, yeah, there's 60 seconds in a minute. This is the international definition of what a second is. It's the duration of 9,192,631,000 of the radiation, corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. By the way, everybody, this definition refers to a cesium atom at rest at a temperature of zero kelvin.

Yeah. Wow.

So. But, yeah, but you're like, okay, that doesn't. That doesn't really make any sense. But now that you understand how atomic clocks are worked, it does make sense. They're saying if you have something that is timed to this, you have a second. That's a second right there. Everybody's going to be on the same measure. That's why it's the international standard. Everyone is on the same measure. And the cesium atom is never going to give out more or less of those waves when it's excited. Yeah.

And like you said, you know, the reason, one of the reasons that quartz was used is because we had worked with it up until that point. We understood it. A lot of the tech was built around it. We've known how to work with it and repair things using it. So, like, they didn't want to reinvent the wheel here. They just wanted to make that quartz run more perfectly. And it turned out it was sitting around in ore deposits in where? Maine and South Dakota.

Yeah.

And cesium comes from. It's pretty rare.

Yeah. And the other thing that strikes me about this, Chuck, too, is when we adopted that second in 1967 and removed our seconds from the solar day because it's so inaccurate. Kludgy, really. We actually became better at tracking the solar day when we turned our attention to tracking the atom for use as a benchmark for time rather than the solar day. I just think that's pretty neat and ironic.

Yeah, I mean, they've calculated that too, right? Because now we have what's called international atomic time tai. It's one of those backwards french things. Yeah, backwards french things. But now we can actually track using universal time and against the earth's rotation and the fact that we're off because, you know, things can slow the earth down, space dust can, solar winds, atmospheric resistance, the moon and gravity tugging on the earth. So they can say now that UTC coordinated universal time is 30 seconds behind the tai, which is pretty cool to be able to know that.

Yeah, they're keeping better track of the, the spin of the earth than the spin of the earth is. Yeah, it's like, it's. That's crazy. Like they figured out that the earth is slowing down by about two milliseconds each day. Could not have done that. When you're pinning the second to 186 thousand, 400th of a solar day, you need atomic clocks to measure stuff like that. So I just think that's just fantastically neat. And they've, they've done so many other stuff or so many other things with this already, too. I say we take a break and we come back and talk about some of the applications for timekeeping in an ultra precise way.

Let's do it.

Get emotional with me, Radhi Devlukia in my new podcast. A really good cry we're going to talk about and go through all the things that are sometimes difficult to process alone. We're going to go over how to regulate your emotions, diving deep into holistic personal development and just building your mindset to have a happier, healthier life. We're gonna be talking with some of my best friends.

I didn't know we were gonna go there.

I'm not doing it this year. People that I admire, when we say, listen to your body, really tune into what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right? And basically have conversations that can help us get through this crazy thing we call life. I already believe in myself. I already see myself. And so when people give me an opportunity, I'm just like, oh, great, you see me too together and find a way through all of our emotions. Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to a really good cry with Raleigh da Vlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Ilya Kani, and this is family therapy.

My best hopes, I guess. Identify the life that I want and work towards it.

I never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of.

I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true?

That's true, and I'm not offended by that.

Thank you for going through those things, and thank you for overcoming them.

Wow.

Thank God for delivery every time I have one of our sessions. Our sessions. Be positive. It just keeps me going.

I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now.

So, how did we do today?

We did good.

The Black Effect presents family therapy. Listen now on the Black effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Tameeka D. Mallory, and it's your.

Boy, my son in general.

And we are your hosts of TMI new year, new name, new, new energy, but same old. And catch us every Wednesday on the Black Effect network, breaking down social and civil rights issues, pop culture, and politics in hopes of pushing our culture forward to make the world a better place for generations to come. But that's not all. We will also have special guests to add their thoughts on the topics, as well as break down different political issues with local activists in their community. If you like to be informed and to expand your thoughts? Listen to TMI on the Black effect podcast network, iHeartRadio, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

That's right.

So atomic clocks were a huge leap forward, but they were very big at first. Obviously, with all kinds of tech like this, it just gets smaller and smaller. I think about 20 years ago, they built an atomic clock that could be put upon a microprocessor.

It's crazy.

Totally crazy. And it's important to point out here that there are a little more than 400 atomic clocks all over the world and more than 70 labs operating these clocks. But you still need, like, you know, one ring to rule them all. You need one clock to tell all the clocks what time it is. So the International Bureau of Weights and measures averages all these atomic clocks that are operating in the world, right. It gives better weight to the ones that are really accurate. So if you got a gold star because your atomic clock in your lab is super accurate, you're going to be more heavily weighted.

If there's a lot of known pot users in your lab, they're not going to weight it as heavily.

So. Well, ironically, we'll see here in a minute comes from Colorado, but it is. Then they're like, all right, this is the real time for the entire world. And then they message that out, as what I mentioned earlier, international atomic time. And here in the United States, or I guess in all of North America, that is broadcast out from a radio station in Fort Collins, Colorado, WWV, that all american clocks sync to.

Yeah.

Radio control clocks.

Exactly. Yeah. So if you have an atomic watch or an atomic alarm clock or something at your house, it's actually passively picking up those radio waves from WWVB, and those radio waves are telling the clock what time it is. So it's keeping accurate time because it's getting the information from, from radio, WWVB, Radio Free Europe.

Yeah, but that's the time that they're like, all right, this is what time it is on the Internet, and that's what time all your trains are going to run and your planes are going to take off and land.

Yeah.

Although those are always going to be late. But, you know, if we're operating in space, if we're using GPS, and you can explain the thing you found on GPS, because that was pretty cool. But all of it is set to that, that agreed upon average of all those atomic clocks.

Yeah. And so people have their own, like, timekeeping stuff. Like if you have an iPhone or like Android or something like that. Whoever is serving that phone has their own time servers. But their time servers are still. If you trace it back far enough, they're getting their information from the atomic clocks that are being maintained, at least in the US, by the National Institutes of Standard and Technology. And then we also have to give a shout out to the US Naval Observatory. They started at first, and they still maintain their own set of atomic clocks. And they are the official timekeeper for the Department of Defense. But they're also the ones that you can call to get the accurate time. And in the United States, you can call 202-762-1401 and you will hear the voice of a man from the seventies who died in the nineties who's still telling you what time it is. He apparently spent several days. Fred Goldsmith, I think.

What's that number again?

20276. 214. Oh, one.

All right. I'm typing that into my phone because I had a weird urge about two months ago to call time like we did when we were kids. You could call and get time and weather in most places.

Yep.

All right. I'm glad to know that's a thing. Cause I'm gonna. I'm going to do it from the phone that I know has all that information on it.

So. Yeah, I was reading, like, an AARP article on it, appropriately enough. And I think they already get Fred Goldsmith. Right? Yeah, that's where I get a lot of this information. No, no, no.

But are you getting mailers yet?

No, I found it on the Internet.

Okay. Just wait till you get your first mailer.

He apparently recorded every possible time it could be, including seconds over the course of several days. And they still use these recordings to tell you what time it is.

Amazing.

One of the other amazing things I saw is, like, they. They just expected this to kind of go away. Once smartphones became so ubiquitous, people just didn't need it anymore. Your phone is automatically communicating with your server, the time server for your phone company. Nope. In 2009, they actually started to see an increase in calls. So now people call more than they did in the early two thousands today.

Tell me moviefone is still around. I'm gonna just quit my job and do nothing but call those numbers all day.

You remember when Kramer figured out that. Yeah or no. Did people think he had the movie phone number? So he started being the movie phone? Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's what happened. And when he didn't know the answers, like, they would be punching in the numbers, he would say, why don't you just tell me the movie?

That's right. Oh, God.

That was classic. Rated R. Oh, man.

I watched the puppy Pirate shirt episode the other day and it was. It still holds up. Yeah.

All right, so we promised talk of GPS. I didn't have time to dig into what you sent. So if you've got it together enough, can you explain briefly how GPS works?

Yeah. So you mentioned that some atomic clocks can be fit under microchips now. Um, and you can find those microchips aboard satellites that orbit space. And we have satellites that are dedicated to GPS. Global positioning system. Right. I actually found this. I got to give a shout out to Arpita Sarkar, who is just some random person on Quora who we hope got it right. Yeah. If. As long as they are not so masterful at mashing facts up and into, you know, into lies, essentially, but just covering it up perfectly, I'm pretty sure this guy got it right. Essentially what they do is like, say you're using waze or something, which I do use. Shout out to waze. I love it. It has an onboard GPS receiver somewhere. I don't know if it's in the way server or something like that. Maybe it's using your phones. It's probably using your phone. And what it's doing is it's receiving a signal from the GPS satellite saying, here's a signal, some GPS info, but also here's a timestamp that came from my. My own atomic clocks that I have on board this satellite. Right. And so your GPS receiver gets it calculates how that, using the speed of light as part of the formula, how long it took for you to get that.

And then it does it again with another satellite and another satellite, usually two or three. And based on all of the differences between how long it took for those satellites to send you that information, it can tell you within, I think, 110ft or 10 meters, I think exactly where you are on planet Earth because it triangulates your location. And that's all thanks to atomic clocks. It wouldn't be possible to do that without atomic clocks.

Yeah. So, I mean, if you're. If you're geocaching, next time you get that Santana record out of the geocache. Thank an atomic clock. Thank cesium 133.

Yep.

Thank the good people of Maine and.

North or South Dakota. One of them.

I think it's South Dakota.

Was that a callback to like a 2009 episode? Is that what we said you could find in the geocache things, man. Chuck.

And for a little while, I think apparently for a little while, some people were. Stuff you should know, listeners were putting santana tapes and CDs.

It's awesome.

And geocaches. But I'm sure that's run its course.

Or maybe not. Who knows? I'll bet there's some retro geocachers that are like, I got the Santana thing going on.

Yeah, I think I was saying geocaches, that's not work.

I've heard people say that before. Although maybe it was you from that episode 2009. What else can you do with this stuff, Chuck?

I mean, I think that's a pretty good summation.

Well, let me add. Let me add one more thing. It's been used in physics experiments, too. It's vital in physics experiments because you're tracking like, say, the decay of particles in atom smashers. And that happens so fast that you couldn't do it without atomic clocks because they're tracking things in the billionths of a second, right? Pretty good stuff. It's also been used more than once to prove Einstein's theory of relativity that there's gravitational time dilation. Depending on the effects of gravity on you and how fast you're traveling in relation to the speed of light, times either going to move faster or slower for you. And so people have taken atomic clocks and put them at different elevations. There was a very.

Not even by much, no, I think.

30 cm for one experiment. And it produced differences in time, time dilation. But there was a really famous experiment called the Halfley Keating experiment in 1971, where they put some atomic clocks on airliners and just flew around the world and then compared them when they got back to the clocks back on earth. And there was a clear distinction between time. It's very, very slight, but it's enough to prove that, yes, Einstein's theory of gravitational time dilation is correct.

Yeah. Like that old thing that you will age faster living in the mountains than at sea level.

Yeah, that old chestnut.

It is true. But I think what they found out was if you live in the mountains, it'd be about 90 billionths of a second less life over a 79 year lifetime.

So everybody's like, why bother? Why bother even telling us that?

Exactly.

There's one other thing, too. So we mentioned. Oh, we didn't mention. I'm sorry, I left this out. Those GPS atomic clocks that they have on board, very, very precise. They still get updates twice a day from back here on Earth. From those international timekeepers. Yeah, just to make sure that the frequency drift hasn't taken over too much. It just updates them. Right. You can't do that the further you get out from space. I mean, these satellites are only tens or dozens of miles above us. Right. As we get further and further out into space, it becomes harder and harder to communicate with Earth and to get, like, updates about what time it is. So they're looking to build ultra precise atomic clocks that can go out in space on board spacecrafts that can, that can keep their own time. They don't need any updating from back here on Earth. They're going to lose so little time over such a long period of time that they will essentially stay calibrated to the time back on Earth for incredibly long periods of time through incredibly long distances out into space.

Why haven't they done that yet? That was my sort of question.

Is it harder they have. NASA launched the deep space atomic clock in 2019, which is like a test that apparently is going very well.

Okay, I was about to say, why don't they just throw one of those puppies aboard the spacecraft?

But they did, and they're using mercury ions instead of cesium atoms or stronium.

That's even better. Right?

It is. Because so one of the things, these atoms, when you have them in like, a cloud chamber or whatever, they can rub up basically against the sides of the chamber, and it's going to mess with them a little bit. It's going to mess with your measurement some. With an ion, you can keep it trapped in an electromagnetic field. It's not going to mess with anything. It's not going to rub up against anything. And so that's how it stays so reliable, how it's. Your measurements are going to stay reliable for a very long time because they're not interacting with, you know, they're not bumping up against anything.

Yeah, they're not slam dancing. They're, they're doing the Billy Idol. They're dancing with theirselves.

Speaking of slam dancing, I went to circle jerks and descendants last week and it was amazing. And there were people, there's a, there's a pit for sure. Was he really those in a long time?

Did you look down and Yumi was body surfing across the crowd?

No, but she was into it. She was, she was there for the descendants, I was there for the circle jerks, but both shows were very good. And a fan came up and said hi at the show.

I think I saw that. An email or something.

Yeah. Yes. She emailed. Was like, I'm sorry if it was, like, awkward or weird. I was like, it wasn't awkward or weird at all.

Yeah, I'm sure it was wonderful, but.

It was a very good show and if you have a chance to see descendants and circle jerks and you like punk, go see it, because it's awesome. It's very good.

Still at it. I love it.

Yeah. If you want. If you want to know anything more about atomic clocks, you can find a whole rabbit hole to go down. See if you can escape madness yourself. In the meantime, it's time for listener mail.

This is one that we've tried to get on recently. It's another peanuts one, but this is a standout. Hey, guys. Charles Schulz was a huge part of my childhood. Though I never met the man, he spent a short amount of time living Colorado Springs early in his career. And while living there, he painted a mural on the nursery room in the house that had many early depictions of the peanuts characters. Years later, long after he moved out, my grandparents, Stan and polly Trabnacek, bought the house. Over the years, they heard rumors from neighbors that Alice Schultz had lived there and painted a wall. By this point, the wall had been painted over several times, but my grandma is an amateur painter, knew a thing or two about paint. So after lots of deliberating and researching, she decided to try and remove the layers of paint over the mural bit by bit, using cotton swabs. Way to go, man. I love Polly Drabnacek for doing this because it would have been lost to time.

Yeah.

The wall and all the characters were revealed. Many of my childhood memories involve that wall. My grandparents. Sorry. Would even give free tours of the wall to anyone interested. And this gets so great.

Yeah.

When Mister Schultz passed away, my grandparents reached out to the family, offered to donate the wall to be a part of the Schultz museum. So the estate coordinated to have that wall literally cut from the house, loaded onto a truck and shipped to California. I will never forget that cold, rainy fall day in Colorado. Was around nine or ten years old. The Schultz family treated my grandparents like cherished friends for years after. After that, and even flew them out first class to be there for the opening of the museum. Mister Schulz was a wonderful man, had an amazing family and made the world a better place. And that is from Mike DeYoung. And I saw pictures and it was, it's really pretty unbelievable. You can google this wall and look it up. And I can't imagine the effort that his granny, Travnichek Nana travnichek Nana Travnacek put forth to tediously, meticulously expose that great work of art.

Also, Chuck, she was researching this at a time where you had to, like, go to the library to find stuff like this out, and they were ruined. It. Yeah. Oh, easily. It could have been like that monkey Jesus art restoration thing. Remember that?

Uh huh.

Okay. And I also want to point out that the Schulz museum flew them out first class, back when first class actually meant something to you.

Oh, burn.

So, yeah, there it is. The most triumphant, greatest peanuts email we received from that episode, and we got a lot of good ones, but Mike DeYoung took the cake. So thanks for telling us all that, Mike. And hats off to granny Nana Travnacek and the whole family and the Schulz museum. That was pretty cool stuff. If you want to get in touch with us, like Mike, if you did, we'd love to hear from you via email@stuffpodcastheartradio.com. Dot.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Madhur le drav Hale of Lektrach Dana Miguel Akharsola er Ruddy Moore Kusula Krishnori Miya Snachori Agastela Fish Akadfui Kabli Rundira Nona Gohan folk of Rishta Schud Tagdan Nur Esther Lat Ainwa the Wil pluckoid Kynera no Koblege a achor soil Saranashke conchocter listed Afionti Fogola Ogzyvun dil Tori Ron Fortake Khasul er mywais Funkai Kurhur foildit Ig real to Snehren get emotional with me, Radhi Devlukia in my new podcast, a really good cry. We're gonna be talking with some of my best friends. I didn't know we were gonna go there on this. People that I admire, when we say, listen to your body, really tune into what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right? Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to a really good cry with Radhi Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

The black effect presents family therapy, and I'm your host, Elliot. Connie Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently co parenting two young boys with her former partner, David.

David. He is a leader. He just don't want to leave me.

Well, how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship like what's the blue part?

David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to family therapy on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.