Word: clock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cycle. Once factory owners realized that time was money--a notion that led to the first so-called efficiency experts in the 1920s--the idea of making every second count began to spread through society. Result: efficiency became an American virtue. Today every conceivable business is open around the clock; we multitask frantically, applying makeup or talking on the phone while driving; we cram our kids' lives with team sports and lessons. Children don't play anymore: they schedule play dates. "We are," says author Gleick, "driven by time...
Technology continues to make things worse. Before digital clocks and watches became common, people rounded to the nearest five minutes when telling each other the time: now we give the exact minute. Before cell phones and faxes and answering machines, we accepted being out of touch. Before the Internet, we didn't feel entitled (much less obliged) to shop or do research or work around the clock...
Technology also demands that time be measured ever more precisely. An accurate mechanical clock proved to be so valuable to the British maritime industry in the eighteenth century that the government awarded a hefty prize to its inventor, Joseph Harrison (a story elegantly told in Dava Sobel's 1995 best seller Longitude...
Behind its barred windows sit 28 atomic clocks, four of them holding atoms of hydrogen and the rest cesium. When excited by lasers or irradiated with microwaves, the atoms begin to dance with an utterly regular vibration that's monitored by computer. Once each second, the results are fed into America's Master Clock; the measurements from this and similar clocks around the world are sent to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures outside Paris--the ultimate timekeeping authority. It is there, next Friday, that the pulsing of billions of atoms will officially signal that civilization's odometer...
...even the most accurate clock in the world can't answer the question of what all these atoms are actually measuring. What is time anyway? According to Isaac Newton, both space and time were fixed attributes of the universe, a God-given stage on which events unfolded. But Albert Einstein torpedoed that idea with his theories of special and general relativity: the only thing that's fixed in the cosmos, he showed, is the speed of light...