According to the clock at the entrance, I was seven minutes behind schedule.
Physicist Jeff Sherman was waiting at the end of a hallway when I arrived at theNIST.
I apologize for being late.
"It's okay, we only measure the fraction of a second," Sherman says.
It has never been simpler to know when it is. The time is broadcasted across the country. Our personal gadgets are fed through computer networks and cell phone towers. Communication, transportation, and lubricates our economy thanks to the agreement on the time.
There is a side to time that the clock doesn't show.
Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire. Prescod-Weinstein believes that time is a social construct. Real time is not the same as other time periods. Sometimes space and time can break down completely in the odder corners of the universe.
She says that this unruly version of time is radical for a lot of people. Our daily understanding of time may need to change as technology improves.
Sherman wants to get a sense of where the rigid time that governs most of our lives comes from. There are three large boxes above the lab benches. There are three boxes labeled with names: George,Fiona andElvis.
It is not an absolute that time is not an absolute.
Prescod and Weinstein are related.
Sherman says that they all have quirks and personality. You give them names when they fail at 2 a.m.
The NIST uses a 21-clock ensemble to generate the official time. Three clocks use hydrogen atoms. The atoms are sent into a chamber. They emit a specific Frequency of Light once inside.
Sherman says it's like hitting an atomic tuning fork.
He says the excited hydrogen emits light. The rest of the clock is an instrument that tries to listen and count the cycles of light that come in.
Light cycles are part of the clock'stick. The NIST has created a system that can count the time in a second. Time can be kept within a second over the course of 30 million years.
The timing signal is sent out across the United States and via satellite to other government laboratories in other parts of the world.
There is a catch to the system. You have to continue to count. You don't know the time if you stop and blink.
Sherman says that you're now beholden to count forever and not lose track.
The NIST clock is an example of how time can be understood. Prescod-Weinstein doesn't agree with that definition. The government wants you to think about time.
She says that the management of time and place is related to authority.
We use the time from this lab to live. When markets are open and schools are arriving, it says. It controls a lot of things.
Prescod-Weinstein argues that governments around the world aren't just giving time to citizens. Society is kept organized and efficient. The goal is to increase economic productivity.
This is the reason why people are tense about the time. "Capitalism sucks and I think a lot of people's relationship to why time is not cool is structured by the resource pressures that we feel."
Prescod-Weinstein says that true time is more flexible than people think. Space and time can bend and curve according to Einstein's theory of relativity.
She said that the way to think about it was that it was stretching out time.
It slows as time goes on.
Time is stretched by gravity. The slower time passes for someone with more gravity when compared to someone with less gravity.
The effect is small, but it is measurable. It is a mile above sea level. The time ticks are a little faster.
Modern technology can't deal with this. The timekeepers at Boulder and other places make changes to make sure the different flows of time look the same. It's the same for satellites that are further away from Earth. The system works by measuring the time difference between the satellites and the time on the ground.
Prescod-Weinstein says that the system wouldn't be as accurate if it weren't for calibrating. General relativity is required for any kind of system that uses gps. The time flow of the satellite is different from the time it takes on Earth.
Time gets really weird even further away.
Time can break down when gravity is very strong. Prescod-Weinstein said that the powerful pull at the edge of black holes slowed time dramatically. The black hole's point of no return is known as the event-horizon.
She says that time doesn't have an arrow like it used to and that space now has an arrow. There isn't a sense of time.
There is something happening at the edge of the observable Universe, according to an astronomer. Time is being stretched by the expansion of the Universe.
She says that the expansion of the Universe makes it take longer for things to happen. The time changes seen near Earth are small, but the effect is much stronger.
Two stars that explode are one nearby and one far away. "If we see a star exploding, and that star takes about 10 days to dim again, if we look at it in the very distant Universe it might take 30 days," Mack says.
From our perspective, the far away star is not exploding more quickly.
Nima Arkani- Hamas.
Mack says that many billions of years into the future, time could get stranger. Energy and matter are being spread out more and more across the void because of the expansion of the universe. The Universe may end up being an evenly distributed cloud of energy and matter.
There is no future in this gray nothingness. She said that time has no meaning at that point. It doesn't have a direction.
Time has some big problems, but also some really small ones. The idea of time itself is being questioned by some scientists who study particles.
Nima Arkani-Hamed is a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Over the past decade, Arkani-Hamed has been trying to understand what's happening inside the world's most powerful atom-smashers. The devices use a lot of energy. It should take hundreds of pages of mathematics to calculate each collision. A simple equation can work as well.
The discrepancy may be due to the concept of time itself. Time is used to keep track of the sequence of events. He believes that organizing particles according to "when" unnecessarily complicates the math. He is experimenting with geometric shapes that can describe events.
Arkani-Hamed thinks that at some point the idea of time will be replaced by something else.
He says that it is unlikely to survive in the fundamental principles of physics.
The scientists at NIST are aware of all the issues with time.
John Kitching is the head of the atomic devices and instrumentation group at NIST.
An atomic clock that can be mass-produced and put on a chip is being developed by Kitching's team.
He says that the vision for the clock is to allow atomic timing to be used everywhere. An atomic clock is in every computer and cell phone.
Humans must improve their clocks just like they improve their maps. New technologies such as stock trading and astronomy can be enabled by better clocks.
Kitching agrees with a theoretical physicist who believes that time is a technology rather than a fundamental part of the universe. He sees time as a result of memories and books being created.
He believes that the forward passage of time is a human construct. It doesn't have a lot of value.
The NIST lab's constant counting of seconds, minutes, hours and days is being used for everything from navigation to power production Humans have enormous social value in trying to tame nature's time-wasting tendencies.
He wants to meet at a certain place at a certain time. We will miss each other if we don't have those two pieces of information.
This story is part of our periodic science series called "Finding Time", which explores what makes us tick.
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