What’s the time? - Marcus Brigstocke, Leon Lobo, Louise Devoy

Introduction

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

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Host Introduction

1:53Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I am what remains of Robin Ince. That's the nature of entropy, sadly. This is the infinite monkey cage from the Royal Observatory Greenwich. And that is why, of course, the show will be beginning with the pips. For legal reasons, we can't play the last pip because apparently it scares the Radio 4 newsreader who thinks they've forgotten to do the news and be ready for it.

2:25That last tone activates Gladys Knight. See, I think it might end up just being... I knew this would happen. The pips was written by, you know, these two sisters in America in the late 1930s, like Happy Birthday. And if you play the whole pips, it goes, oh, my God, the BBC's got to pay £500 to their estate now.

Timekeeping History

2:44Now, today's monkey cage is about time. Because the show has been recorded at the Greenwich Observatory in its 350th year. In 1675, King Charles II signed a royal warrant for an observatory to improve navigation at seas. And the building was designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. You've never sounded more like Simon Sharma than you do now. And that worries me because I think you're going to branch out as if you're not on television enough. The fact you're then going to start doing history stuff as well. And as we know, you don't believe in history because you believe in the idea of the block universe and that all time is in many ways happening at once.

3:16And so that's going to make a very odd show. Today.

3:23Greenwich is still synonymous with navigation and timekeeping. And so we will celebrate the observatory's anniversary by exploring time. Why do we need to know the time? How was the time measured? That's an odd one, is it? Why do we need to know the time? Because otherwise we're late. We're going to find out why we need to know the time. The history of timekeeping. Okay. Why do we need to know the time? How has the measurement of time changed? And how do we keep time today? To help us explore time, we are joined by a cataloger of collections, a traverser of time infrastructures, and a connoisseur of Kurds.

Guest Introduction

3:57And they are? Hello. I'm Leon Lobo. And I've been heading up the National Timing Centre programme at the National Physical Laboratory. So sort of lead on the strategy and what we need to do in the UK around resilient time. And my favourite timekeeper, actually, is a very personal one, a few years ago, was my son every morning used to wake us up with, where's my breakfast? And that was particularly amazing for us.

4:31Not anymore. And thinking back, probably wasn't then either. But we've got a display back at NPL where we have all the atomic clocks that maintain the UK's time. And we've got this display that ticks at the thousandth of a second. And if ever there was a place to set your watch, that was it. It's something to see. Did you ever give your son his breakfast or just every morning? It was the same. Basically pointed him towards the serial down there. He still does it, mind, and he's 17.

5:04Hello, I'm Louise DeVoy, and I'm Senior Curator of the Royal Observatory here at Greenwich. And I do research on the history of the site. And that includes everything from the buildings to the historic scientific instruments to the stories of the people who lived and worked here. And for me, my favourite timekeeper is actually the park around the observatory. Because in the spring, we just get this explosion of pink cherry blossoms. And then in the autumn, it gets that sort of reddy gold hues, really lovely in the morning.

5:34So it's very basic. It doesn't involve any fancy instruments. But it's a really nice, colourful way to start my day. And it's a really profound sort of reminder of the Earth's journey around the sun. I'm Marcus Brickstock. I'm an international cheese judge and comedian as well. But the cheese is the main thing these days. And I think my best, most loved, and important timekeeper is also that of a father. I'm a dad to a four-year-old. And if I want to measure one hour, I try to put one of his shoes on.

6:11And that's about an hour. And this is our panel.

Time Importance

6:20Leon, I just want to pick up on, because Robin thought that that question, why do we need to know the time, was kind of a silly question. Somehow there's an obvious answer. But I can tell you about why we need the time now. Pretty much everything we do in our daily lives, underneath all of it, all our digital infrastructure, relies on time to operate. Whether it's the show being broadcast when it does, or whether it's how we got here with SatNav,

6:51or whether it is we got our tickets for the trains and paying for that. But everything that we rely on these days, from a digital perspective, is underpinned by time for synchronization, typically. But it's everywhere. Louise, historically, when do we start to see any care, let's say, in terms of synchronizing time across a country and then across the world? Sure. I mean, Leon raises a really good example with the railways here in the UK.

7:22A, so in 1847, the railway companies all decided to use Greenwich Mean Time across the whole network. Because originally, the timetables were based on the railway terminus, whether that was in Cardiff, Liverpool, or wherever. So you'd have about a 30-minute variation across the whole country. So trying to get a train from Liverpool to London was just impossible. You'd miss your connection. We'd love a 30-minute variation. I was going to say, I don't want to challenge the proper experts on this, but you may be aware of this already.

7:53Southern Rail used an entirely different means of measuring time that is almost entirely arbitrary.

8:04So the time at a different railway terminus, is that just based on the clock at the terminus? Is that based on astronomical observations? A bit of both. They were still actually using sundials, sundials and clocks, to sort of regulate local time. And then, yeah, in 1847, they thought, hang on a minute, we need to coordinate. So they chose Greenwich Mean Time, London Time. And then by 1852, the observatory was starting to send out time signals via the telegraph network so that clocks at railway stations could be checked and calibrated.

8:36And so that really sort of made GMT just part of everyday life. Ever since you mentioned about the seasons, all I've wanted to ask is, but how effective are dandelions for telling the exact time? Because I was thinking about that, because when you mention the seasons, and I know that sounds facile, but actually that's one of my favourite things. During the spring, when I was a little bit later on, again, watching the passing of time by looking at a dandelion. So in certain different places, again, in the nature of the change in seasons, I would go, the dandelions in this area have reached this point of being a flower.

9:06At this point, they've now become the dandelion clock as such. Because that's, you were all brought up with that, weren't you? That bit of blowing on the, and I love all of those kind of mythic ideas and the idea that perhaps that is what Southern Railway are using. This enormous number of dandelions are going, I know some of these kind of modern faddy people are using clocks, some of them even with quarts. But as far as I'm concerned, it does hinder the spread of seeds. Are you, in terms of, are you someone who's, are you interested in time? Marcus, are you someone who kind of likes that sense of time? No, I've found as I've got older, I like it less and less.

9:41And I like existing in a space of a bit of uncertainty. Although I'm no longer late for things. I mean, I was for a long time. I think I was late for something when I was about 19. And then I never really made up the time. And then just was consistently late for about sort of 20 years after that. And then eventually made up the time. But no, I find more and more I like it when I don't quite know the time. Or also where I am.

10:12You mean you're reaching your Ken Dodgers in terms of the, he doesn't realise it's three in the morning. When can we leave the Weymouth Pavilion? Well, yeah. No, I mean, as a comic, I've always loved that Steve Martin line. He said, comedy is all about timing, timing. There's something a bit magical about the timing of when you see something on stage, not just comedy, anything, that it's kind of perfect. Same in music, right? When the time signature changes, you don't feel often, don't feel thrown by it.

10:44You feel elated by it.

Timekeeping Mechanisms

10:46Leon, so we talked about the time being synchronised to Greenwich in 1847. Yes. So what does that mean exactly? So how is Greenwich keeping the time? So Greenwich is the home of time in the UK, the historical home of time. There are a few changes that occurred over the last century, effectively, where the advent of pendulums and then you're looking at quartz coming on the scene and being able to start to regulate time much, much better.

11:20One of the things that also changed was some of the work that took place at our end in Teddington, in fact, at the National Physical Laboratory, where there's a scientist called Louis Essen who built this system that demonstrated for the first time that an atom was actually a better regulator than the Earth itself, which led on to atomic time keeping and the basis how we measure time now. But the whole piece around how we relate to time, GMT is still used quite heavily,

11:58but the global time standard as such is UTC now. It's Coordinated Universal Time is what it's called. So historically, could you just run through what we mean by how do you keep time on the Earth before you have a mechanical clock and then before you have an atomic clock, and how do you synchronise all that together? So the Greenwich Meridian is key to that. So when the sun is at its peak, you've got noon, and essentially it was decided that 86,400 seconds was a day.

12:35I love that, Marcus. It was decided that. Yeah, rather than it started getting light again. But why was that the division? No, the division, though, right? You're talking about the division. Okay. So why that number? So it's one rotation, 24 hours divided by 60 minutes divided by 60 seconds. This gives you your fraction of one second as a part of the Earth's rotation, and that's really your sort of fundamental unit for centuries. The 24 hours stems from the Egyptians.

13:06They had 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness, and that made really good sense from the latitude of Egypt because the daylight only varies between 10 to 14 hours across the year. But also 12 was their favourite number because if you've got your four fingers, you've got your three joints, you can count to 12. You've got your own sort of portable abacus you can carry around with you. So that's why 12 was so important within their culture and numerical system, and we've kind of inherited that legacy. We were talking about this very briefly before,

13:36but in the end of the 1700s, 1793, I think it was, following one of their revolutions, France decided to change it to decimal time, and it was chaos immediately. Trying to divide the day up into 10s, literally nothing worked, and no French person knew where they were or what the time was, and they've stuck with that, bless them. But my favourite, just on France, very briefly, my favourite clock is in Saint-Tropez in France.

14:09There's a wonderful clock tower there, if you're ever lucky enough to go, and the clock tower in Saint-Tropez has clocks on three sides of the four of the clock tower, and the reason it doesn't have a fourth one is that faces Saint-Maxime across the bay, and they said, if they want a clock, they can get their own.

14:30It's so beautifully French. It's like, no, get your own clock. You raised the question about the definition of the second. So as you defined it there, as the Egyptians would have defined it, it's just a fraction of the length of the day, which is related to how many knuckles, and fingers you have. So how has that changed? How do we define the second now? So the second is now defined by the cesium atom, and it's defined by a particular transition,

15:03an electronic transition in the cesium atom. A good clock with an atom is one where you have electrons in their shells, but you need a very, very specific energy to transition an electron from one shell to the other. Now, in the case of cesium, that hyperfine electronic transition essentially allows us to put in this very specific energy and then count the cycles

15:37to essentially determine what duration is one second, which is 9.2 giga cycles of the cesium frequency. And that's the basis of how we measure the second now. So Essin, when he first demonstrated that, his clock, which is in the science museum, it's a beautiful thing, it's not a mechanical device in the same way as Harrison's clock's ear, but it's as beautiful, was stable at the second over 300 years.

16:11So we'd lose or gain a second over 300 years. And the devices that we use now to tell us what duration and time is second are accurate and stable at a second over 158 million years, give or take a second. And then there's a whole next generation of clocks that are coming as well, which are even more stable. And by the end of this decade or in the next few years after that,

16:42the international measurement community or metrology community are going to be now looking at how we redefine the second by a different set of atoms. That makes me think then, though, going back to old clock mechanisms. You know, I was thinking about before we have, you know, Greenwich Mean Time when people might have had fob watches or whatever it was. And this idea of how do watchmakers, when they're making those watches, I presume not every second was the same length in a watch. Yeah, the observatory was very much involved with this. So you have these portable,

17:12accurate sea clocks called chronometers that mariners were using to work out their longitude by providing a reference time. And the makers would be making them. And you assess each instrument according to its rate. So how much it speeds up or slows down every day. But obviously, you need to compare it against something. So the chronometer makers in Clerkenwell in North London used to come over to the observatory and check the time here and then go back and try and check their instruments. But obviously, that was really tedious. So the Astronomer Royal

17:43then set up a time board that could drop at precisely 1pm every day in 1833 so that both mariners on the Thames could check the time and check to see if their chronometers were too fast or too slow, but also chronometer makers. And then later on in 1852, we installed the gate clock. I don't know if you've seen the big dial with the 24 hours. So now people could see GMT for themselves without hassling the Astronomer Royal. We mentioned in the introduction actually, this observatory is about navigation. So could you explain

18:14why it is that you need accurate time in order to navigate? For navigation, it's all about the Earth's rotation. So you're out at sea, you're looking at the stars, you know your local time and you want to compare it with something else to work out how far the Earth has rotated and essentially how far away you are. Now there's one technique that involves using the Moon, but for that you need really good star charts. You're trying to plot the position of the Moon against the background stars. So that's one option. The other idea is to take this clock

18:45with you, this reference time that essentially tells you what time it is back home so you can compare that to your local time to a reference time and then work out the difference. So navigation and timekeeping are completely wrapped up together and that was really fundamental to the observatory's work. So your local time is coming from just midday essentially? Yeah, so you'd measure noon from the highest point of the Sun and then you'd perhaps keep track of that during the day either with a sand glass or a watch and then when you do your observations at night

19:16then you can see how much time has passed. So you're talking about would it lose a second your atomic clock that you were talking about every 168 million years? 158. Oh, it's not as good as I thought actually it sounds a bit shabby. I'd work harder. First of all that's very much the clock of an optimist isn't it in terms of the longevity of us but what are the changing needs within our culture and within our economies that just says we need this so exact? So our telecom networks as an example

19:47requires synchronisation and in order for those to operate and be able to send out data between your devices at that sort of rate for you to make video calls the synchronisation requirement is very, very stringent. You're looking at the microsecond level so a lot of the metrology institutes the measurement institutes around the world that contribute to UTC formulation the global timescale is really about

20:17being able to have the systems and the devices that are many orders of magnitude better than what our use cases require in order to be able to commercialise and put those in place. That's just one example of course phase synchronisation of the energy grid relies on time. Trading systems in the finance sector they are trading at tens of thousands of trades per second which absolutely need to be synchronised and be able to be correlated with each other.

20:48Everything is only going to get faster and more volume of data and more distributed and all of that needs to be underpinned by time. You mentioned UTC several times so we're here in Greenwich everyone will know about Greenwich Mean Time and now UTC so what's the difference? UTC essentially is the global time standard that is used for civilian time around the world. What it is essentially

21:18is all these atomic clocks globally there are about 500 and about 85 national labs around the globe that contribute data to create something called free atomic time but free atomic time essentially is like a weighted average of all this data and it's you could consider it to be sort of stretchable. Now we lock down what duration in time is a second by getting data from the cesium fountains that we have which are

21:49what we call primary frequency standards so essentially they provide us with the realisation of the second so what duration in time is a second and to lock down that stretchy timescale to create something that's what's called international atomic time then and UTC essentially ensures that both atomic time keeping and the mean solar day stay true to each other as such and not diverge

22:20and that introduces something that many people haven't heard of you've all heard of leap years there's something called the leap second and in order to keep those two timescales within 0.9 of a second of each other because the earth is wobbling and slowing down and now it's actually speeding up we introduce a second into the day and that unfortunately can play havoc with digital systems that are trading

22:50or operating so quickly which day did it come in this year because it didn't it didn't happen this year oh ok what happened well I was cooking an egg and it was overcooked and I just wondered if that was you I like a soft yoke but I was going to ask you that it's complicated did you have any idea that time is so complicated I think we're asking you about it's eggs it is complicated because four minutes doesn't it's naturally we're only half way through

23:21this explanation of what it's it's way more complicated than I expected and of course I feel disturbed if we haven't disturbed you we have failed yes this is Jay Shetty from On Purpose with Jay Shetty push it bend it flex it introducing the latest rule bending innovation from Brooks running the new Glycerin Flex feel the freedom of a cushioned shoe that doesn't

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Global Time Standardization

27:51Leon described that today we have this global infrastructure to set the time so therefore an agreement a global agreement on how to set the time so we talked about the agreement across the UK in the 1840s how do we see the development of the international standardisation of time? This really comes about because of travel and trade so in the mid 1800s you've got new technologies railways steamships telegraph networks and so that the world is effectively shrinking and becoming very

28:22sort of globalised and at the time there were about 11 or 12 different prime meridians zero degrees in use all set up by various national observatories and it just became so confusing so a conference was organised for 1884 and people came together various delegates from different countries and after about a month's worth of discussions they decided upon choosing Greenwich as the prime meridian zero degrees longitude simply because the majority of shipping companies were already using British charts

28:52and maps that were based on Greenwich so it was a very pragmatic decision with hopefully the minimal disruption now as we're looking at this change this kind of advance we start to think about the distances that we might be travelling whether we do travel to Mars whether we become a more kind of extraterrestrial species how does that change as well in terms of how we examine time and how we measure time gosh I think it's going to be a real challenge say for example if we start to explore

29:23the moon more are we going to have lunar time we could try and use UTC but it's going to be tricky because there's going to be a time delay we want to try and coordinate with what's happening on Earth but we also need to be true to sort of lunar time itself because it's slightly different so yeah I think we're probably almost going to have to have different times for different planets it'll be interesting to see how it pans out so it'll be like Chico time as well I think it's another system that's been used previously hammer time of course in the early 90s

29:53which I know was something that you know you kept to hammer time for a good few years in the 90s didn't you that's how I got up in the morning it's how I knew it was time to go to bed and it meant you never got out of your pyjamas because they just looked so similar Leon given the importance of this infrastructure so we've talked about the importance of synchronisation across the economy it's clearly vital to everything that we do today how robust is that system where is it who owns it should Marcus worry don't worry about it

30:24too much the tone of that was very worrying wasn't it so managing the time as a timescale is pretty much useless to anyone unless you can disseminate it and that's been the case forever Belville is a hero of mine who came to the observatory every day synchronised her pocket watch and sold the time to the traders in London that's such again sold the time

30:55that is such a beautiful we sell the time these days as well yeah that carries on we've not stopped sort of innovating on that front so we've got radio signals that are broadcast across the UK we've got time over the internet and we've got a very dedicated service for the traders and the stock exchanges where they need very very precise time most people would say well it's probably my phone that's probably the most accurate thing so where is that

31:26getting its time so there are several methods so computer systems typically get their time over the internet so as soon as you log in or turn on your computer it'll sync its time to what's called a network time protocol server but on your phone you probably get your time from your telecom provider who probably gets its time almost definitely gets it their time from the global navigation satellite systems like GPS and Galileo which the

31:57constellation gets its time from a UTC lab so in the case of GPS it's the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC and GPS particularly and now more so Galileo and some of the other constellations is the easiest way to get precise time because it's global but with that also we've got to ensure that we have access to many different methods because if you rely on just one you can be vulnerable

32:27when you lose it sorry I have a question what sort of excuses do people give at your office when they're late so as a measurement institute we can tell you that it's not that we're never late at any meeting we can tell you exactly how late we are Louise we've heard about this technology the atomic clocks this remarkable technology