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More accurate clocks may add more disorder to the universe, scientists say
Live Science ^ | May 17, 2021 | Ben Turner - Staff Writer

Posted on 05/17/2021 8:22:05 PM PDT by LucyT

What’s the price of an accurate clock? Entropy, a new study has revealed.

Entropy — or disorder — is created every time a clock ticks. Now scientists working with a tiny clock have proven a simple relationship: The more accurate a clock runs, the more entropy it generates.

"If you want your clock to be more accurate, you’ve got to pay for it,” study co-author Natalia Ares, a physicist at the University of Oxford, told Live Science. “Every time we measure time, we are increasing the universe’s entropy."

As we go forward in time, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system must increase. Known as the "arrow of time," entropy is one of the few quantities in physics that sets time to go in a particular direction — from the past, where entropy was low, to the future, where it will be high.

This tendency for disorder to grow in the universe explains many things, such as why it’s easier to mix ingredients together than separate them out, or why headphone wires get so intricately tangled together in pants pockets.

(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...


TOPICS: Astronomy; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: astronomy; clocks; entropy; physics; science; stringtheory; time
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To: Mom MD

Universe vs. a small subset known as a system.
Recall too that organisms are open systems.


21 posted on 05/17/2021 8:59:07 PM PDT by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change with out notice.)
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To: LucyT

One of my favorite things is accurate time. One of my favorite shortwave stations is the NIST WWV/WWVH time signal. The signal is run by an F-1 cesium fountain atomic clock. It’s accurate to within 1 second every 16 MILLION years.

I’d say that’s accurate enough for my needs.


22 posted on 05/17/2021 8:59:22 PM PDT by hoagy62 (DTCM&OTTH)
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To: cpdiii

Please don’t post the Maxwell relations.


23 posted on 05/17/2021 9:00:04 PM PDT by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change with out notice.)
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To: LucyT

24 posted on 05/17/2021 9:00:32 PM PDT by Uncle Miltie (GMO opponents who took the covid jab are now GMOs themselves.)
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To: LucyT

Like I might be my own grandpa after all?


25 posted on 05/17/2021 9:05:43 PM PDT by Bullish (CNN is what happens when 8th graders run a cable network.)
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To: Mom MD
I do not understand how people can reconcile be second law of thermodynamics with evolution.

They can’t. So-called “macro” evolution is utter foolishness. Sure, there are a few in the evolution camp who can wax eloquent in their idiocy, throwing out red herrings along the way to mislead, such as crystal formation, the old white vs. black moths, or even “evolution” of viruses, but in the end they have no credible way to explain how simple organic compounds, combined with random undirected energy can form even the most basic protein molecules, much less unimaginably complex organisms like humans. In fact, to get back to entropy, even if a few amino acids or even proteins somehow magically formed in the “primordial soup” long ago, they would not be relentlessly pushed upward into more complex forms via unguided energy, such as lightning, but would certainly be immediately destroyed by a different type of energy, ultraviolet light.

But that’s just the problem of trying to explain the origin of the chemical building blocks of life via materialistic mechanisms. FAR more difficult to explain is how information, and a coding system to encode, store, decode, and error correct that information came into being by random chance and the innate properties of certain chemicals. That’s just flat impossible. Any code, such as the genetic code, can only be created by an intelligent mind because it takes intelligence to assign meaning to what would otherwise be nothing but arbitrary sequences of nucleotides, and to develop the processes and nano-machinery for storing, decoding, and error correcting that information.

26 posted on 05/17/2021 9:14:43 PM PDT by noiseman (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.)
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To: Salamander

funny!


27 posted on 05/17/2021 9:16:08 PM PDT by Pelham (Liberate the Democrats from their Communist occupation)
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To: Jamestown1630

Currently the clock in the upstairs bathroom is “correct”.

Come November I start subtracting an hour.

:D


28 posted on 05/17/2021 9:23:43 PM PDT by Salamander (Salamander has barbaric tendencies.../Gundog)
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To: Pelham

Relatively humorous.

;)


29 posted on 05/17/2021 9:24:27 PM PDT by Salamander (Salamander has barbaric tendencies.../Gundog)
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To: Salamander

LOL!

Time is only a sort of ‘construct’ anyway. It’s only good for keeping everything from happening all at once.

(You have a clock in your bathroom???)


30 posted on 05/17/2021 9:27:51 PM PDT by Jamestown1630 ("A Republic, if you can keep it.")
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To: Jamestown1630

“Time has no meaning and a narrow purple beak”
/National Lampoon hilarious article, probably P. J. O’Rourke...it’s been 40 years

Sure.

I need to know what time it is when I’m getting dressed to go somewhere.

That poor thing is probably 10 years old now and never fallen back or sprung forward.

Bottom line is that it’s always now.

/Living in the past/present/future


31 posted on 05/17/2021 9:39:30 PM PDT by Salamander (Salamander has barbaric tendencies.../Gundog)
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To: LucyT

Sounds like a ticking time bomb.


32 posted on 05/17/2021 9:53:22 PM PDT by bluejean (Living one day at a time in the national psych ward.)
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To: lee martell

Leap, not light years.


33 posted on 05/17/2021 10:01:14 PM PDT by piasa (Attitude adjustments offered here free of charge)
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To: Jamestown1630
(You have a clock in your bathroom???)

We have clocks in our bathrooms.

34 posted on 05/17/2021 10:04:37 PM PDT by LucyT
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To: Jamestown1630

Bathroom clock: How else do you know if you have brushed your teeth long enough?


35 posted on 05/17/2021 10:07:35 PM PDT by reg45 (Barack 0bama: Gone but not forgiven.)
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To: LucyT

My Watch: An Instructive Little Tale
Samuel Langhorn Clemens, ca. 1870

My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining, and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized messenger and forerunner of calamity. But by and by I cheered up, set the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart.

Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler’s to set it by the exact time, and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to set it for me. Then he said, “She is four minutes slow – regulator wants pushing up.” I tried to stop him – tried to make him understand that the watch kept perfect time. But no; all this human cabbage could see was that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator MUST be pushed up a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed.

My watch began to gain. It gained faster and faster day by day. Within the week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred and fifty in the shade. At the end of two months it had left all the timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen days ahead of the almanac. It was away into November enjoying the snow, while the October leaves were still turning. It hurried up house rent, bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not abide it. I took it to the watchmaker to be regulated. He asked me if I had ever had it repaired. I said no, it had never needed any repairing. He looked a look of vicious happiness and eagerly pried the watch open, and then put a small dice box into his eye and peered into its machinery. He said it wanted cleaning and oiling, besides regulating – come in a week.

After being cleaned and oiled, and regulated, my watch slowed down to that degree that it ticked like a tolling bell. I began to be left by trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch strung out three days’ grace to four and let me go to protest; I gradually drifted back into yesterday, then day before, then into last week, and by and by the comprehension came upon me that all solitary and alone I was lingering along in week before last, and the world was out of sight. I seemed to detect in myself a sort of sneaking fellow-feeling for the mummy in the museum, and desire to swap news with him. I went to a watch maker again. He took the watch all to pieces while I waited, and then said the barrel was “swelled.” He said he could reduce it in three days.

After this the watch AVERAGED well, but nothing more. For half a day it would go like the very mischief, and keep up such a barking and wheezing and whooping and sneezing and snorting, that I could not hear myself think for the disturbance; and as long as it held out there was not a watch in the land that stood any chance against it. But the rest of the day it would keep on slowing down and fooling along until all the clocks it had left behind caught up again. So at last, at the end of twenty-four hours, it would trot up to the judges’ stand all right and just in time. It would show a fair and square average, and no man could say it had done more or less than its duty. But a correct average is only a mild virtue in a watch, and I took this instrument to another watchmaker. He said the kingbolt was broken. I said I was glad it was nothing more serious. To tell the plain truth, I had no idea what the kingbolt was, but I did not choose to appear ignorant to a stranger.

He repaired the kingbolt, but what the watch gained in one way it lost in another. It would run awhile and then stop awhile, and then run awhile again, and so on, using its own discretion about the intervals. And every time it went off it kicked back like a musket. I padded my breast for a few days, but finally took the watch to another watchmaker. He picked it all to pieces, and turned the ruin over and over under his glass; and then he said there appeared to be something the matter with the hairtrigger. He fixed it, and gave it a fresh start. It did well now, except that always at ten minutes to ten the hands would shut together like a pair of scissors, and from that time forth they would travel together. The oldest man in the world could not make head or tail of the time of day by such a watch, and so I went again to have the thing repaired.

This person said that the crystal had got bent, and that the mainspring was not straight. He also remarked that part of the works needed halfsoling. He made these things all right, and then my timepiece performed unexceptionably, save that now and then, after working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate spider’s web over the face of the watch. She would reel off the next twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang.

I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he took her to pieces. Then I prepared to cross-question him rigidly, for this thing was getting serious. The watch had cost two hundred dollars originally, and I seemed to have paid out two or three thousand for repairs. While I waited and looked on I presently recognized in this watchmaker an old acquaintance – a steamboat engineer of other days, and not a good engineer, either. He examined all the parts carefully, just as the other watchmakers had done, and then delivered his verdict with the same confidence of manner.

He said:

“She makes too much steam – you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the safety-valve!”

I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense.

My uncle William (now deceased, alas!) used to say that a good horse was a good horse until it had run away once, and that a good watch was a good watch until the repairers got a chance at it. And he used to wonder what became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers, and engineers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell him


36 posted on 05/17/2021 10:10:56 PM PDT by Williams (Stop Tolerating The Intolerant)
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To: piasa

Ah, yes. Leap Years!


37 posted on 05/17/2021 10:11:49 PM PDT by lee martell
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To: Don W

bingo...and accuracy of measurement lets us see the entropy better.


38 posted on 05/17/2021 10:17:06 PM PDT by PCPOET7 (`)
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To: Williams

Very nice.

Thank you for your delightful story.


39 posted on 05/17/2021 10:18:45 PM PDT by LucyT
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To: LucyT

A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches can never be sure.


40 posted on 05/17/2021 10:38:58 PM PDT by Auntie Dem (Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Terrorist lovers gotta go!)
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