Hi Bob, That's right. The Hawking/PBS show wanted to show time dilation. My goal was to make absolutely sure that the experiment worked. Given that the UK producers flew a group of ten to Tucson for the filming I did not want to be the one to screw up. So that's one reason my car had so much gear. It's wasn't "spare" like an unused spare tire; all the gear was running.
A full set of 3 + 3 clocks, counters, dist amps, power supplies, laptops, a triple redundant 12/12/120 VAC power system, 750 pounds of batteries, etc. All clocks were compared for a week before the trip and during the 2 day trip down to Arizona, as well as comparison amongst the 3 hotel/car clocks and the 3 summit clocks. Again, I did not want to be the one to screw up the film, or make relativity look bad. Oh, it was also a one-shot experiment; the schedule did not permit any "re-takes". So let's say I felt some pressure to make sure it all worked. I even signed up for AAA when I realized that the car itself was a single point of failure. I brought the SR620 along because I like its bold camera-friendly display. For the final scene we used it along with just two 5071A, to keep things simple. The focus was time dilation, not clock ensembles or multi-channel phase comparison techniques. But, yes, behind the scenes, all 6 clocks and 53132A counters were used in the experiment. This arrangement allowed me a seamless backup if one (or even two) of the clocks died, or lost power, or was dropped. As it turns out nothing went wrong, so my reward is more data than necessary; for additional self-checking or a sqrt(n) boost. /tvb ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Camp" <[email protected]> To: "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2016 9:15 AM Subject: Re: [time-nuts] GENIUS by Stephen Hawking (PBS TV), Hi If you noticed, when they played at the back of the car, Tom seemed to have a few “spare” 5071’s along….. Just out driving around with a half dozen 5071’s in the middle of Arizona …. nothing at all odd about that …. Any time you see a TV show that does something like this, you can be pretty sure that there are things going on to make it “flow” for the average viewer. I think they did a terrific job in that respect, without turning it into mush. Bob _______________________________________________ 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.
