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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

Crappy article.

Sure, the more precise your oscillator is the more you need to worry about other effects. Basic cesium beam clocks are precise enough the altitude based corrections for relativity are required to achieve full accuracy. Each km of altitude is about 10ns/day of slew, ... I can measure this myself with equipment I have at home (I have an unusual home).

So sure, when you start making optical clocks with accuracy in the 1e-18 land then external effects may well be much harder to correct for, e.g. tides have an effect at the 1e-17 level ... but such a device could still keep time better than prior techniques. The "They just may not be able to tell us the time" is rubbish hyperbole that just serves to confuse readers who don't already know the subject well.

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This is the worst kind of comment and what is wrong with Hacker News.

No one cares about your intellectual superiority, or the fact this might be a special interest for you. This article wasn't written for you, you already know and understand its content. There is literally nothing you could have got from it.

I on the other hand enjoyed the article. This isn't a field I'm familiar, so in general my knowledge was increased. That some concepts are misrepresented and dumbed down is obvious, but this is far out weighed by the general knowledge that was imparted.

Writing is all about picking an audience and conveying it effectively to the audience. It's fine to point out inaccuracy or build on the finer points, but don't be aggressive about it and don't insult the article because it offended your superior intellect.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, but in my opinion the article was misleading. Not just simplified.

I didn't go on and on in detail about systemic and random effects, linking to NIST tech reports on all the corrections they have to do on primary standards (http://tf.boulder.nist.gov/general/pdf/1846.pdf?origin=publi... on the redshift error at NISTs boulder facilities; and http://tf.boulder.nist.gov/general/pdf/2704.pdf on the sources of error in the F2 primary reference, see section 3.2 on relativistic effects), or pointing out people's amateur time keeping experiments where they demonstrate relativistic influence on decades old hardware ( http://leapsecond.com/ptti2006/tvb-project-great-ptti-ppt.pd... (this presentation is long and a ton of fun)), etc. or all the other bits of trash I could have pulled out to demonstrate knowing something here... because that wasn't my goal, the only point I was trying to make is that the article was likely to make many readers _less_ knowledgeable about the subject.

(But I will give those links now, because this argument is boring and time is neat!)

Perhaps you have enough background that you were not thrown off by the seeming claim that improved accuracy somehow makes these experimental references _less useful_, and you already know that relativistic effects aren't unique to optical lattice clocks and already must be compensated for, but I am sure that this is not universally the case.

What I get from the article isn't nothing... Potentially I get community around me which is less informed than they started and all that entails. Perhaps that's compensated for the fun they had reading about an interesting subject? or the additional learning they do after? I don't know, but I think the article could have been just as enjoyable without the bogus mystique that makes it misleading.

But if pointing out an article was, in my opinion, potentially misleading makes me everything that is wrong about Hacker News, I'll wear that proudly.

I, for one, think it's more likely the case that crappy shock headlines like "end time as we know it", constructed drama, and false freshness are a bigger drag on HN (and wider society) than any of my posts are likely to be... but to each his own.

For what it's worth, the new thing I got from the article is the unexpected idea that one could usefully measure non-time phenomena with a really precise clock, such as gravity or altitude. Definitely more thought inspiring than many other articles, in spite of the way it was written.

You didn't really respond to his No one cares about your intellectual superiority, or the fact this might be a special interest for you part of his comment.

Your tone and delivery is a bit offputting.

And the thing that I didn't see you comment on that I found particularly fascinating was that the increased resolution of these clocks is such that you can discern differences in relativistic effect between floor and wall. That changes how I think of time.

(My favorite headline that I read sometime around 1965 is "Dating Events in the Vicinity of a Leap Second.)

OK. Dunno what to say there. I thought the article was misleading because it was intentionally sensationalized, not due to some lack of intellectual capability or because it wasn't addressed at an audience with a background in the subject. I'm sure that I know less about the subject than everyone interviewed in in the article. If anything, I think knowledge makes it better, since you're not likely to be mislead by it.

Wrt relativistic effect, the first NIST paper I cited shows that they needed altitude uncertainty less than 1m to avoid redshift from dominating the clock's error. The second shows that for the improved F2 reference redshift is one of the largest sources of uncertainty (and the corrected part is orders of magnitude larger than the other listed systemic errors). It's really cool, I agree. I'm happy to have people share in enjoying that, but sad about whatever causes the press to always have to present things as new and categorically different than what came before.

There are a number of really cool things they didn't mention: For example, these optical lattice clocks that they're talking about are solid state-- involving mostly only lasers and vacuum cells. Unlike cesium based atomic clocks, they may have reasonable prospects of being mass produced inexpensively in the future, and efforts to do this are being funded by DARPA (useful for many military applications, like jamming systems and anti-jamming, navigation, and various sensing applications). So unlike the state of the art atomic references these things may someday show up in very inexpensive equipment, and allow for some fun science experiments, improvements to reliable distributed systems, long baseline amateur radio astronomy, etc.

Or, Tom Van Baak measuring gravitational redshift with a minivan and some old HP cesium beam clocks. okay, not "floor to wall", but if you haven't read his presentation on it, you should, it's a load of fun and IMO, more accessible in that it's not talking about technology that exists in a rats nest of cables on an optical table in a single lab, but just old junk you can find surplus. :)

This is the worst kind of comment and what is wrong with Hacker News.

This article is poor scientific journalism. "New clock may end time as we know it." Seriously? How is that remotely true? There is nothing in this article that justifies that headline. If anything, this new clock affirms our understanding of the nature of time, pointing out the minute changes that we expect to see but have not had instruments sensitive enough to measure until now.

But that desire to pin down the elusive ticking of the clock may soon be the undoing of time as we know it: The next generation of clocks will not tell time in a way that most people understand.

Undoing of time as we know it? Will the existence of this clock somehow magically make all other clocks in the world turn incomprehensible? No, the truth is that most of society won't even be aware of this "undoing of time as we know it."

And on the subject of telling time in a way most people don't understand, that is already true of the cesium clocks they mention. We already have to deal with relativistic drift, of which most people are ignorant.

But this new clock has run into a big problem: This thing we call time doesn't tick at the same rate everywhere in the universe. Or even on our planet.

This line makes it out like we didn't know about relativity. Also, I hardly think more precision is a problem. If anything it gives us power to do things we never have done before. Technologies like GPS wouldn't work without the current generation of clocks. I'm excited about the new possibilities that an even more precise clock will open. It's not a problem.

They just may not be able to tell us the time.

What?!! This is incredibly misleading. The new clock will be just as able to tell time as all of the clocks we've had up until this point.

I could go on, but nullc is right, this article is crap. It is dripping with sensationalism.

> We already have to deal with relativistic drift

You already mention GPS later in your comment, so it isn't that necessary, but I want to emphasize anyway: we are not only "dealing with", we are "making use of" it. Things we use every day would be impossible, if we wouldn't have precise enough clock to measure all that stuff already.

And have since the 70s( http://support.radioshack.com/support_tutorials/gps/gps_tmli... ). Pretty wild.

The fact you don't like his comment doesn't make it "worst kind of comment". Nothing was essentially wrong about what he said. Maybe kinda harsh, I don't know and don't really care: it's plain stupid to favor fanciness of speaking to correctness of facts delivered.

In turn, there were wrong, imprecise and misleading statements in that article, which does make it bad to some degree. It's not the worst of it's kind, but still pretty bad. Actually I would consider it harmful, to write something that is easy to pick up for uneducated people, that gives them impression that they understand it while giving them wrong impression about the subject, that is, being misleading. I'm not sure I could appreciate that even if it was impossible to write easy-to-understand useful quasi-scientific articles/books, but as I've seen them I must conclude it's not impossible, so that makes people writing misleading stuff with attractive headlines even more guilty.

Your comment in it's turn contains nothing, but claiming somebodies comment is "worst" based only on that being not populistic enough. I would say it makes your comment "the worst kind of comment and what is wrong with Hacker News".

> This is the worst kind of comment and what is wrong with Hacker News.

> No one cares about your intellectual superiority, or the fact this might be a special interest for you.

Comments like this may often offer a fair bit of factually correct information and interesting insights. Opposing views, strong opinions, critical thinking—all this seemed more like a “feature” of HN rather than a “bug” to me.

(Sorry, I may have accidentally downvoted you; this was not intended.)

I though the article was cute, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it was crappy. The essence of the article was on point. You can't just report the time anymore, once special and general relativity become important, you have to report space-time. Sure, other effects are going to become important as well, but the essence of the article: time is not absolute, and this has practical difficulties for clock-makers, was well communicated.

You already can't do that, though. This isn't some new problem experienced only by this clock, though it's more sensitive to it.

The GPS satellites already had to correct for the passage of time being different for them relative to the surface of the planet. Decades ago.

The comment where the man makes a comparison to measuring electric current but tries to make it seem like we understand time better than electric current annoyed me. As if we have a greater fundamental understanding of what an electric charge "is" vs. time.

I love this page on that subject:

http://amasci.com/elect/charge1.html

It's not exactly 100% current (pun intended) but it makes the point nicely.

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