Posted on 11/19/2022 5:02:07 PM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets
Congress has no authority to delegate their job of fixing weights and measures to any international body. That’s one reason why our measures differ from the Imperial system that the UK uses/used, i.e. back when Congress actually did their job.
Submitting to so-called international standards (ultimately decided by another country; and “international” has been co-opted by the communists for about 175 years) destroys the independence of the USA, ultimately translating into doing that country’s will and not our own. And yes, resisting the communistic United Nations is a hill we’ll end up dying on (or off) whether of our own will or against.
Of course they have that authority. Don’t be silly. That clause does not mean America has to use their own sets of measures, that would be dumb. Especially in this modern world.
Again it’s JUST measurements. It’s a stupid hill to die on. Congress figured that out, you should catch up.
Well, that screws up my monthly bill payments!
Proof by assertion. Never mind a slippery slope to say “just” anything, particularly when given a direct charge in the Constitution; the Founding Fathers gave it that level of importance for good reason.
Proof by assertion is all you’ve got. The Constitution does NOT say Congress can’t outsource the weights and measures. You’re ASSERTING it, but you’ve got no proof.
The concept of operation of an atomic clock is nowhere near that straightforward. What all c(a)esium clocks do is tune a voltage controlled quartz oscillator that is used in a frequency synthesizer to produce a 9192631770 Hz signal. The 9192631770 Hz signal is used to illuminate a beam of ca(e)sium atoms that are all in low energy state, with the magnetic field of their single valence electron opposite the direction of their nucleus. If the ambient field is tuned to 9192631770 Hz it maximizes the number of cesium atoms that will absorb a photon of 9.19 GHz microwave energy and become excited to higher state, with the valence electron and nucleus’s magnetic fields aligned. After the beam leaves the microwave cavity, powerful magnets separate the atoms in the high energy state from those in the low energy state. The quartz oscillator frequency that maximizes the number of atoms absorbing photons is the desired frequency.
Surprisingly this is one of the sharpest resonances known, and the chemical and physical properties of cesium commend it to practical application. There are sharper resonances, but cesium is relatively cheap to instrument. Cheaper implementations, such as rubidium, are not as precise.
Edmund Halley, famous for the eponymous comet he never observed, noted that ancient eclipses occurred about two hours too early in the first millennium BC. He attributed it to an increase in orbital speed of the moon, but actually, it was due to slowing down of the earth, since then.
Days advance with respect to the seasons in the Gregorian Calendar, at a rate of about a day every 3000 years. Still that's better than the 3 days every 400 years of the Julian Calendar. That would result in 5000 days slippage in 15 million years. However the loss of 0.0015 seconds per day in rotational speed would mean the day would be about 225 seconds, or four minutes shorter in 15 million years, for a cumulative loss over 15 million years of almost 20,000 days, or 53 entire years!
I blame global warming.
I recall on the Bob Newheart show that the “other brother Darrell” never spoke. It finally came out that he used to speak all of the time until he learned that the English were on the metric system. ;-D
Over a lifetime, those extra seconds have an impact on the compounding of interest.
In addition, when you are 89, it makes accurately timing my 100-yard dash very difficult...
Very sloppy of me, sorry. I arrived at that number by assuming they typically find it necessary to add about one leap second every year. So (because there are approx 32 million seconds in a year) in 15 million years (why use 16 when you can use 15?) we’d be celebrating Christmas in August, or thereabouts.
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