Research Highlights

Fellow Judah Levine recently presented a discussion of our understanding of time from antiquity to the present day in an insightful paper published in the April 2016 issue of the European Physical Journal H.

In a rural northern Colorado landscape punctuated by plentiful corn fields, a tree farm, an abandoned feedlot, and a handful of McMansions, only one thing is certain: the exact time. The nation’s backup time scale, consisting of four atomic clocks, two measurement systems, and supporting hardware is tucked away inside radio station WWV's remote transmission station, located 12 miles northwest of Fort Collins. Fellow Judah Levine travels to the station site an average of once a week to check on the performance of the backup time scale, which he designed and built in 2005.

When Albert Einstein said, "the only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once," he didn't know about studies performed by Senior Research Associate Christine Hackman and Fellow Judah Levine. These time-and-frequency experts work quite hard to devise ways of comparing the accuracy and stability of the world's premier atomic clocks - so that things like satellite communications and high-tech navigation can happen precisely when they're supposed to, including all at once.