Word: sadeh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...When the sun rises, Physicists Dror Sadeh and Benjamin Au report in Nature, the ticking of their test atomic clock mysteriously slows down and then speeds up. Sadeh and Au observed this disconcerting phenomenon after discovering another strange effect: the farther they carried an atomic clock from their laboratory, the slower it seemed to run in relation to a similar clock that was left behind. Pondering the strange "distance effect," they decided to compare the performance of two atomic clocks at separate, fixed locations over an extended period of time. They stationed one clock at Cape Fear, N.C.; their other...
...first, Sadeh and Au were inclined to blame environmental factors. But when they varied the temperatures at both stations, for example, the atomic clocks did not respond in any way. Other checks seemed to eliminate atmospheric irregularities that might have affected the radio waves carrying the time signals between North Carolina and Washington. The experimenters also ruled out a time slowdown that might have been caused by the mass of the sun or moon. Totally baffled, they concluded that they had observed "a new phenomenon which does not have any obvious explanation...
...week the director of the time service division of the Naval Observatory, Dr. Gernot M.R. Winkler, voiced the strongest doubts yet. "We have 100% proof that the distance effect is all wrong," he said, "and a 95% chance that the sunrise-moonrise effect is spurious." Which still leaves the Sadeh-Au question: Why did the clock appear to slow down at sunrise...