From The Royal Institution.
RV Jones explores the history of man’s attempt to measure time, from early hourglasses and pendulum clocks to quartz and atom measuring devices.
Watch all the lectures in this series here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbnrZHfNEDZw-UIpDJcH_g8d6Ii84pEDs&si=6_78ZnKHL-OglB4x
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This was recorded on 2 Dec 1981.
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This year marks 200 years of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures — a world famous series showcasing science, curiosity, and mind-blowing demos, and started by the legendary Michael Faraday himself.
To celebrate, we’re unlocking the archive. Every Saturday, we’ll upload a classic lecture to our YouTube channel — some not seen since they aired on TV. Sign up as a Science Supporter and get early access here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYeF244yNGuFefuFKqxIAXw/join
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From the 1981 programme notes:
This lecture will be concerned principally with the measurement of time, starting with the natural time-keepers constituted by the earth’s rotation about its axis and its revolution around the sun giving our day and year respectively Early attempts at mechanical clocks were mainly in the direction of devices in which water or sand ran out of a small hole in a container, resulting in the water clocks of the ancient world and hourglasses of the egg-timer variety. None of these, though, was precise nor could it measure short intervals. For this latter purpose, some phenomenon which repeated with a period of not more than a few seconds was required. Galileo realised that he had one available in his own body— his heart beat; by counting his pulses while watching the incense—burning pendulum swinging in the cathedral at Padua he discovered that the swing of a pendulum takes almost the same time whether swinging either a large arc or a small one. He also discovered in the same way that the distance covered by a falling body is proportional to the square of the time of the fall.
The pendulum clock resulted from Galileo’s discovery, and it was soon found that oscillations of a mass attached to a spring performed the same kind of simple harmonic motion as a pendulum, and so the spring balance watch was evolved by Robert Hooke. This led to the development of the chronometer by Harrison. By paying great attention to detail, Harrison was able to reduce the time-keeping error in his portable chronometer to about one second per day. By the early nineteen hundreds, pendulum clocks could be made to keep time to better than one-hundredth of a second per day. Quartz clocks, in which the electro-mechanical oscillations of quartz crystals are counted, could by 1960 achieve better than one-thousandth of a second per day, and now atomic clocks can be set to one ten-millionth of a second per day.
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About the 1981 CHRISTMAS LECTURES
The Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution started in 1826, and there have now been more than one hundred and fifty in the series; and yet none has previously been on the theme of this year’s lectures, which is measurement. Perhaps this is because the measurement is so much part of human life that we tend to take it for granted; but if we are to understand how our modern world, with all its achievements and its dangers, has evolved, then we need to know what measurement is, the principles by which measurements can be made, and why their applications have been of so much importance in the advance of science and in the development of technology. And we also need not be carried away by the spectacular successes of measurements, such as awakening mankind to the huge store of energy in the atomic nucleus, or the microchip, or the control of space probes as far away as Saturn; for despite Plato’s proud claim that ‘man is the measure of all things’ there are many qualities in life that are very difficult, if not impossible, to measure such as love or courage, and we should therefore be cautious about extending measurement beyond its proper domain. But within that domain, measurement is one of the most challenging, fascinating and rewarding of human activities: this is what the lectures are intended to show.
Find out more about the CHRISTMAS LECTURES here: https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures
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