On Tuesday, June 17, 2025 at 2:07:34 PM UTC-6 Brent Meeker wrote:
On 6/16/2025 9:56 PM, Alan Grayson wrote: On Monday, June 16, 2025 at 10:47:25 PM UTC-6 Brent Meeker wrote: On 6/16/2025 9:26 PM, Alan Grayson wrote: I admit that I don't know how a clock is constructed by the fact that there is a known, fixed frequency of emitted radiation in the decay from the first excited state to the ground state of Cesium 133. Further, I also don't see how a clock can be constructed by a statistical quantity of the half-life of a muon. The decay time for any muon is undetermined, so how can a clock be constructed by its decay time? TY, AG -- Because you can have bazillions of them and get a pretty accurate interval by counting up to say a million decay events. Brent Who or what does the counting? Seems rather impractical. AG It would be possible to count them electronically, but I wouldn't claim it was practical. Maybe that's why there are no muon clocks and atomic clocks don't use decay rates. Brent Apparently, for Cesium 133, there's a particular transition which has a frequency suitable for defining a second. How is this any help in building a clock if we don't know, and apparently can't know, when such a transition will occur? AG -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/98767db3-e25a-41ee-aad8-4c43bb73e30an%40googlegroups.com.
