Precision timing, clocks and Development

The weather has always been important to civilizations throughout history, despite the fact that only now, in modern times, we arrived at some understanding of what the weather.

Narrative time has always been important, particularly for our agricultural past, when identifying the events on that date on the calendar to plant crops or how much time left until the night was crucial.

Our systems tell the time were always based around the movement of the Earth. A year is defined as one full orbit of the sun during the day is a revolution of our planet.

This method of solar time and lunar say is fundamental to the way we live our lives, it is not necessary to have a system that would allow weather days adrift in the evening and vice versa.

Time to say it was very basic to the Middle Ages, when the first mechanical clocks appeared in Europe. Before the water clock this time, basic, sundials and other crude timer was the only way to keep track of all the hours passed.

The first mechanical clocks were not very accurate and has called for a point-and-unloading Foliot (a system of gears that advance the gear train at regular intervals or 'ticks'), but soon the new technologies means that the clocks has become more precise.

The next big step forward in the waiting time has arrived with the development of quartz in the first half of the twentieth century. These new electronic watches were much more accurate than their mechanical parts-cons because it was based on a vibrating crystal (usually quartz) that oscillates when an electric current passes through.

Even if the clock has become smaller and more sophisticated, real accuracy is not achieved until the development of atomic clocks in 1950. The atomic clock uses the resonance of individual atoms (in most cases, cesium) which was so exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations per second that the international system of Units (SI) defined a second that the number of oscillations' s cesium atom.

Indeed, while the electronic clock may lose one second every week, the atomic clock will not lose a second in several million years.

This increased accuracy, however, has been shown to cause some problems. Because of this precision, it was quickly discovered that the Earth's rotation, what we have based our system of time over the millennia, was not as accurate as our watches.

Given the gravity of the Moon from Earth, the Earth slows down gradually each year. Although this slow rotation of the Earth is less than one second of one year if it was not represented last days slipped into the night and vice versa (although in many millennia), making a forecast useless.

The only solution was to seconds more each year or so on to the international time scale (known as UTC or Universal Time Coordinated). This second jump, as they are called are considered by some as a loophole to keep the correct time and want to abolish, while others (including astronomers from around the world), argue that it is essential to monitor the 'track of night and day .

There are many ways to keep the correct time and the best solution is to use a dedicated NTP server to receive time signals from atomic clock time transmission via a radio signal or GPS. Watches dedicated Ethernet are also available that can receive one hour of an atomic clock.