And it's such strangely fascinating stuff that in the early 1990s it inspired the creation of an Internet newsgroup, Alt.cesium, which was devoted to "discussion, praise, veneration, and adoration, the posting of songs, poetry, stories, and parables of and about that most sublime of elements". įor starters, it's sometimes spelled "caesium." Cesium was discovered in 1860 by Robert Bunsen, better known to high school chemistry students as the inventor of the Bunsen burner. That's the part that scientists actually use to calculate time and break it into incredibly brief units of less than a billionth of a second. The difference in energy between the outermost electron's closest orbit to the nucleus and its farthest orbit corresponds to a radio frequency of 9,192,631,770 cycles. In the case of cesium, which is used in atomic clocks, scientists focus on just one of the element's 55 electrons - the outermost one, which occupies an orbit that's conspicuously higher than the rest. The distance between the lowest orbit and the highest orbit that an electron moves in is the frequency. Physicists have discovered that electrons are amazingly regular in their movements - they tend to remain within a narrow range of orbits, with the distance from the nucleus determined by how much radiation they're emitting at a given moment. Imagine an extremely tiny version of our solar system, with planets revolving around the sun, and you'll get the general idea. Īs we explained previously, electrons orbit the center of an atom, which is called the nucleus. Because an atom's oscillation involves incredibly small units of time - a cesium atom, for example, has a frequency of 9,192,631,770 cycles per second - and is extraordinarily consistent, a clock set to that oscillation can keep time much better time than that old grandfather clock. Instead, they use oscillation - that is, the change in the flow of electrical charge - in between an atom's nucleus and its surrounding electrons, the same way an old-fashioned grandfather clock might use a pendulum. Unlike the bomb, though, atomic clocks don't split atoms and they don't blow up. That knowledge came in the wake of the World War II Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. In reality, though, atomic clocks are one of the more benign inventions to emerge from the explosion - oops, maybe not the best word choice - of knowledge about the workings of the atom and its parts. The term "atomic clock" may conjure up scary, 1950s-horror movie mental images: A Doomsday device, constructed by a lab coat-wearing maniac in a mountain fortress, is ticking away the seconds before it wipes out our entire planet.
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