The Atomic Clock - The Time continued to run.
When most people believe in the digital age and computers, satellites and mobile phones, the silicon chip is what comes to mind of people. Yet despite its importance in the world, one of the technologies we use without thinking and that we could not pass us is the atomic clock.
The original atomic clock the most accurate was developed in 1955 by Dr. Louis Essen, born in England. He worked during World War II radar on a high frequency
which led him to develop the method of resonance to measure the speed of light.
In 1955, with the same technology it developed the original atomic clock the most accurate of the world, national physics laboratory in the UK. This clock was based on the resonance of the cesium atom.
According to quantum theory, atoms can only exist in states of energy that are quantified on electron orbits.A cesium clock operates by exposing the atoms in microwave until they oscillate on one of their sound frequencies. It was discovered that a cesium atom resonance 9192631770 hertz (per second).
With the accuracy of resonance signals and the large number of oscillations, the atomic clocks (sometimes called cesium clocks) are exceptionally precise. The original device Essen provided a precision of a second for 1,000 years while the second generation of atomic clocks are so accurate that they will not lose a second, this over a period of several hundreds of millions of years.
<ds of millions of years.
At the end of this level of precision, problems have arisen over how the time scale is structured. Traditionally, the GMT (Greenwich Meantime) is the basis of time. GMT is based on the principle that the sun has reached the highest point at noon (or on the Greenwich meridian).Unfortunately, as atomic clocks are so accurate, it was discovered that the land itself was not as precise during its rotation and was frequently slowed by the effects of gravity of the moon.
If we let things be, at the end, the International Atomic Time (TAI - the time the atomic clocks) and derive no longer synchronized with the GMT: the drift could be several days or even millennia.
The Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) was developed to address these problems. The latter is based on TAI and how the slowdown in the Earth's rotation works if you add the second occasional breaks, including 33 that have been added since the 70s.
The atomic clocks are crucial for telecommunications networks. Shipments of messages or data packets must travel around the world need to be decrypted because time is the only reference point that a computer can be used to assemble the packages.
The atomic clocks also gave satellite communication potential because the speed of light is too fast (900,000 km per second), a slight variation over time could create big differences. The satellite navigation systems (GNSS) such as GPS (Global Positioning System) depend heavily on atomic clocks because the signal time is what uses a GPS receiver to triangulate a rental.
Thanks to atomic clocks and its devices such as server NTP (Network Time Protocol) which assigns a time reference to an atomic clock, it is received by radio or GPS receiver on a computer network to synchronize computers Check. With these technologies, electronic transactions can be made up to 5 nanoseconds closely. If there were such technology, commercial transactions online as the stock market, buying a plane ticket or even bidding on the Internet would not be possible.
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