I just finished my Colloquium on leap-seconds at the USNO, and afterwards had lunch with Demitriou Matsakis and one of his Fountain building physicists.
Remembering a previous discussion on the topic here, I asked if building a fountain would be a feasible amateur project. The answer is "yes, if you have enough money". The shared wisdom was that you want to build your vacuum vessel out of aluminium, which in addition to being a-magnetic also makes it possible to bolt the windows in, rather than mounting them by welding and that rubidium is a better target atom than cesium. Gentlemen, start your lathes... -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
