Posted on 04/03/2014 6:09:54 PM PDT by zeestephen
"It has an accuracy that's equivalent to about one second in 300 million years." - "If we've learned anything in the last 60 years of building atomic clocks, we've learned that every time we build a better clock, somebody comes up with a use for it that you couldn't have foreseen."
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
It continually goes around and around, both hands without stop for about 15 minutes? Btw, this is a wall clock.
It doesn’t do this twice a year though, as I said it never did this again.
At the time we did replace the battery. While the battery was out the clock was doing nothing. When we replaced the battery it went right back to doing it.
YET we still fart arount with stupid daylight savings time.
It has indeed done it, you just didn’t see it.
If it doesn’t do it, it is malfunctioning.
And while we’re on this subject, I have another nit to pick!! There’s no such thing as 12 AM or 12 PM. It’s either 12 Noon or 12 Midnight!! Glad I got that festering little problem solved...
I want a second opinion.
I’ve seen mine do this spinning thing like you describe once. I think what was happening was loss of radio signal so the clock kept spinning because it had nothing to tell it to stop here.
That is typical of "cheap" atomic clocks (less the $100.) I own 4 of them.
Without exception they can't adjust themselves backwards. So when it resets itself daily, and it's a few seconds fast, it spins like mad until it synchronizes with the correct time the hard way.
Why that is still so, I have no idea; the oldest and the newest (spanning a 20-year period) all behave identically.
I would think that the efficient way to do that to conserve battery power, would be to just stop the clock for 4 seconds, rather than spin forward for 23 hours, 59 minutes and 56 seconds.
I suppose that would complicate the logic of the clock, and triple its cost. or something equally silly.
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