![]() This was one of the first questions I put to Judah Levine, an eighty-two-year-old JILA physicist and one of “America’s timekeepers.” “The handheld guys are typically wrong by a second or a half-second,” Levine said. I noticed that my own watch-the Garmin Forerunner 935, a “premium running watch,” which generally gets its time from four of the thirty-one operational GPS satellites encircling the globe-looked to be a second behind. The site features a map of the United States, divided into time zones, as well as a variety of subsidiary clock displays (Chamorro Standard Time, Aleutian Standard Time) that ticked, at the second level, in seeming synchrony. time-run by NIST and the U.S. Naval Observatory. The night before my visit, I’d opened , the very official-looking page-headlined official u.s. JILA (it rhymes with Willa) is a research institute operated by the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a large and relatively little-known federal agency that plays a significant, if quiet, role in our everyday lives. This summer, after five decades of wondering what drove clock time, I found myself at the nation’s temple of timekeeping: the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado. Yet it left me with a gnawing inquiry: How does she know what time it is? I imagined that time emanated, like the Emergency Alert System, from some secure government facility, possibly underground. But nothing felt so immediate, so curiously satisfying, as having the exact time delivered through the intimacy of the phone’s earpiece. I would stare, transfixed, at the Foucault pendulum at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry as it swept slow traces through its day or gawp at the patinaed green clock, topped by a scythe and hourglass-carrying temporal patriarch and marked with a single word- time-that adorned the Jewelers Building on East Wacker Drive. ![]() I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time. ![]() When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the “time lady”-an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out-who would announce, with prim authority “at the tone,” the correct time to the second.
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