Atomic Clock
On time and reaching for what is bigger, and harder to imagine, than ourselves
Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, a round up of my writing, then some thoughts on my recent work experience, media I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own.
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ATOMIC CLOCK
On June 29th, the Earth spun around its axis faster than usual. One such spin typically takes 24 hours or 86400 seconds. We call this a day. On June 29th it took 1.59 milliseconds or 0.00159 seconds less. The discrepancy was on the order of ten billionths of a day, akin to ten seconds in 31 years. The reason as to why the Earth suddenly, briefly, sped up is somewhat mysterious so a barrage of articles about the “lost” milliseconds was inevitable. At the same time, it seems unlikely that anyone, including the scientists that made the measurement that uncovered this loss, actually felt it.
***
A few weekends ago, while my mom was visiting from Croatia, she, my partner and I set a Saturday aside to wake up early, take the train up the Hudson river, score the best vegan donuts in New York state, and visit Dia Beacon. Though I knew about it and wanted to visit it since long before I lived in New York City, the museum still left me in awe.
We walked in warm from the sun, sticky with sweat and dusted in sugar from that one mixed berry filled donut we had shared, equally tired out by the weather and perked up by the sweetness of both our very indulgent breakfast and the very good company we made for each other. The spacious, bright, cool building took us out of a moment of squinty eyed staccato chatter and into a moment of a curious silence as we tried to take it all in.
Dia Beacon is located in a flat, long building that used to be a Nabisco printing plant. Stepping over its entrance, I certainly did feel like it could house enough machines to actually make something, like there will be at least one room taken up with something monstrous enough to have been able to tear your arm off back in the day. The ceilings are high and there are many windows that let the light seep in and bounce off of white walls, making the space look even more like it will offer the visitor an opportunity to get lost. At the end of our visit, as we settled into the museum coffee shop backyard with about three drinks each I was sort of impressed that we had actually managed to see everything the building had to offer.
Having been trained to not only professionally deal in abstractions as a theorist but also to lose sleep over connecting those abstractions to physical reality as a physics theorist, I am susceptible to the kind of art that merely offers you shape or technique and invites a complex kind of curiosity about its meaning. A room of canvases painted white is not that different from a page of greek symbols and an occasional number, situated next to each other in a way that is certainly meaningful but getting to the core of that meaning is a journey, and an effortful one at that.
Many modern artists like those whose works are collected at Dia Beacon are also purposefully in conversation with mathematics and physics, breaking glass to comment on its not-quite-crystalline nature, playing with the index of refraction of and shadows cast by materials that divide up galleries, mocking the golden ratio by drawing purposefully misshapen polygons, creating huge sculptures that are not quite spheres nor toruses but will certainly make you dizzy as you walk around their obscure geometry.
Recently, I did some reporting on how our brains see compared to how our eyes work as physical instruments and I have long been interested in how wonky geometries affect physical properties of quantum systems. When you’re a physicist everything also looks like physics by default anyway so the hulking sculptures and colorful canvases lit up the part of my brain that houses a comforting kind of decoding impulse.
The exhibit that most got to me, however, was a selection from On Kawara’s Today series. Here, the artist created over 3000 paintings that simply show the date when they were created. They are small canvases painted to be a dark background with stark white lettering. The date formatting on each follows the convention of the place where the artist had found himself that day. On days he spent in the United States, the month comes first while when he was visiting Europe he painted the day first. Though Kawara did not use stencils, his lettering is impeccable even when his font of choice changes over time. In a few instances he made more than one painting in a day. On days when he could not complete a canvas before midnight, he’d destroy it. Absences in Kawara’s timeline hide failures, and abundances mark days that were extraordinary.
Walking into the gallery where the Today series is housed at Dia Beacon is almost boring: it’s just white walls covered in small dark, dated canvases. Knowing about the artist’s intentions, of course, adds interest and intrigue (What happened on those days when he failed? Why was he traveling?) and the room assumes a whole other character once you realize that it is a physical representation of one man’s journey through spacetime. It’s a bit like standing inside of a very personalized clock, an imperfect one even, with all the missing or doubled-up dates. Except that outside of art it is becoming exceedingly difficult to explain how a clock works or what keeping time actually means.
***
A second has for a long time been defined in terms of some clock. To define the second then, you have to define what a clock is. In theory, anything that oscillates is a little bit of a clock, the grandfather clock with its anachronistic pendulum being the most stark example. If you can identify a regular interval of back-and-forth or up-and-down you can divide time up accordingly. Consequently, to make better clocks scientists had to find better oscillators in nature or build better oscillators themselves.
The Earth, though it executes a periodic motion, is, as was underscored on June 29th, a pretty bad clock and physicists actually gave up on using it as such centuries ago. Mechanical oscillators can, like a child on a swing that’s not being pushed, succumb to friction and stop or even turn chaotic if they’re given the wrong kind of push by accident. There is also a whole world of electronics and electronically driven oscillators. This is the world the costumes of which we’ve adopted across the board instead of staying in the mechanical world of Newton, the one that allows me to not be writing to you on a typewriter right now. Eventually, physicists too did settle on using electrons, but not inside of wires like those in your watch or phone. Electrons, the tiny particles at the core of many headaches physicists encountered as paradigms were shifting from classical to modern in the 1930s, are integral pieces of most precise clocks today and play into how we define the second.
Currently, the definition of the second, as given in the International System of Units reads as follows:
“The second, symbol s, is the SI unit of time. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ∆νCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9 192 631 770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to 1/s.”
It’s a definition that is hard to parse no matter how many seconds of time you have experienced, but the big clues are the mention of the element cesium (Cs) and the phrase “ground-state hyperfine transition frequency.” What the definition is really saying is that finding the best oscillator that we can pluck from nature and use as a time divider, or a clock, comes down to seeing how electrons jump, or transition, from one state to another inside of a cesium atom that is almost as cold as the laws of physics allow.
It took decades of atomic physics theory calculations and experimental developments on using lasers and magnets for cooling atoms to only billionths of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero to get us here, but we can make these so-called atomic clocks now. And they are so precise that the numbers trying to capture how good they are at chunking up time become hard to imagine.
A few days before the odd fast-spinning day the Earth had in June, University of Colorado’s atomic physics luminary Jun Ye told New Scientist, about the atomic clock his team had built in recent years, this time out of strontium atoms:
“Back in 2015, we did some calculations and converted the precision of the clock to a more understandable value. It came out as being precise to within 1 second in 14 billion years, which is the lifetime of the universe. Since then, the precision of the clock has gotten better – so now it is 1 second in multiple universe lifetimes.”
Reading this, I was jealous that it wasn’t me that got to interview Ye but also stumped at his need to use the lifetime of the universe as a meter stick.
It is hard to imagine some state of an electron or to relate it to anything like a feeling. Yet, if you allow yourself lots of latitude and a pretty egregious pathetic fallacy, the kind where inanimate objects are treated as if they were little people in particle clothing, you can think about a time you’ve transitioned from being in one state to being in another, one maybe described by a slightly different set of words for your mood, an emotional equivalent of the quantum numbers that delineate states the cesium’s electron is switching between. But being able to say how often it does that so precisely that the time it takes for a universe to be born and mature is not enough to encounter a mistake? That seems to have no emotional equivalent. Even as a physicists I have a hard time believing that something so related to my experience of the physical world keeping time can be so precise and reliable.
***
Everyone always writes about this, how psychological time differs from physical time and how we don’t really fundamentally know what time is. I’ve done it too. I’ve gotten bogged down in stories about the arrow of time and about memory and even the block universe where time doesn’t actually exist at all. When I wrote about the work of the artist Luca Buvoli earlier in the years, I focused on his pieces that explored spacetime and what he dubbed “COVID time” or the slow, bleak experience of endless days in quarantine and lockdown. Buvoli grew up liking comics and comics are all about manipulating time by putting past, present and future onto one page, within one grid. He had also read up on time dilation, a phenomenon in Einstein’s relativity where time is quite literally elongated, where it becomes longer not because we feel bored but because the laws of physics require it to stretch out like a piece of (invisible) gum.
Buvoli and I spoke about this parallel for a long time when I first saw some of the art in his studio and then again after he had shown a full exhibition. I got to see all of it twice and pick my questions accordingly. I asked him one of my favorites: did reading about physical time dilation give him solace while he was experiencing psychological time dilation due to the pandemic? The answer was complicated and hard to pin down. And I think I knew we wouldn’t converge on some grand theory on how understanding science can always, and not just sometimes, help you live within the world it describes. Not to be dramatic, but physics might just not really care about your feelings all that much.
The atomic clock, now at the foundation of how physicists define time, holds in itself something of a contradiction. The cesium atom and the strontium atom and the electrons within them exist independently of our interest. They hold the potential to be amazing clocks even when we are not looking. In this sense, using an atom to measure time removes us, humans, from the equation as much as possible. The inkling of the notion of time is just there, if something else were to nudge electrons into jumping between states, they’d still do it with regularity.
Yet, to make an atom into a clock you need a doctorate in physics, lots of money and a whole lot of intention. I’m not saying we invent time when we build an atomic clock nor do I think we find it as some sense of time seems to be hardcoded in how we experience life. However, we do seem to have to put an effort into inventing a time measurement that is so good that it is completely divorced from our feelings. In other words, we feel time, we want to make it less feeling-like, we build a clock out of an atom, and the atom, which sort of feels nothing, liberates from our subjective experience of time.
***
Sitting in the Kawara gallery I was thinking about whether the artist had also encountered the tension between the personal and the impersonal that comes with marking time. The paintings showed discipline and something approaching austerity at first. Then, the more I looked, more of a richness crept in. Some canvases were a little more blue, some featured a slightly different brush stroke in painting a dot or a comma. The artist had cataloged his days in the most minimal way, barely acknowledging a time when he existed and was working, but once he put the brush down there was inevitably something personal about that time.
While science does not often seem to encode the personal into its large project of collecting what we deem objective knowledge, it does similarly allow us to create our own measurement devices. We pick the clocks that we will build to step outside of our feelings - when we feel like it.
When I told my partner about the short day we had had without even knowing it in June, he promptly brought up that it was then good that time is not measured based on a day having to be 24 hours. Our definition of an hour will get messed up if this keeps happening, he asserted. As if on autopilot, I launched into a discussion of atomic clocks, but the remark stayed with me. Would time feel more real if it was tied to something as experiential as the duration of a day, if we chose a clock that contains us instead of electrons? Or would we just abolish it all together if there was too much feeling in our measurement instrument, too much of what we already grasp to make the concept useful as a window into something bigger?
The fact that we can measure time in a way that feels unfathomable allows us to consider things so much bigger than ourselves, like the universe, and so much smaller, like the electron. If we just go through the trouble of defining it in a way that is a priori really not obvious, the second tethers us to a world that we cannot see. That world, again, invites a kind of curiosity that is not always easy to cultivate within ourselves, one that we have to train to be bolder and ask bigger questions every time we learn something new. It sometimes feels silly to ask some huge question like why the universe is as old as it is, but those bold questions are sort of a guarantee that we will never fully sink into the bleakness of the kind of psychological time we are familiar with from long days spent working in an office. In some sense, it is remarkably exciting that time exists outside of our heads - it leaves the possibility of us moving through it towards something equally unimaginable fully open.
In the Kawara exhibit, I found a painting with my birthdate but the wrong year. Irrationally, I took a picture of it as a means of laying a small claim on that moment and its completely imaginary overlap with the artist's experience.
Best,
Karmela
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
At almost a third of a year on the job, I am both reporting and writing lots and it is becoming harder and harder to pick favorite stories.
I was not the most focused researcher, but as a writer my remit has become so wide that these days I am telling scientists that they can send me "any physics smaller than space" and "anything with the word quantum" - and I even broke those boundaries by reporting on a hidden galaxy mapping project and a salty, icy moon of Saturn.
I want to single out this short piece about a very fast yet very soft tiny robot just for the joy of watching its tiny, upside-down-U body “run” (though there is some more serious physics to it) and this story about a landmark nuclear fusion experiment and what happened in its aftermath. This latter story did require that I ask some fairly complicated questions and organize my article in more of a story arc than the news items I write more or less daily. I turned this piece around in about two days, including interviewing three researchers on very short notice for all of us, and I’m at least a little proud of having been able to do so.
LEARNING
Though it feels like I am working more and more, and also having more and more opportunities to work in different modes as a writer and a journalist, much of what I learned in the month since my last letter has been squarely on the emotional and personal rather than the professional side of things. Spending time with my mom, reuniting with my partner after his unexpectedly long stay in Europe (where he meant to be only briefly for a work-related obligation), intentionally blocking off space and time to invest in existing and new friendships, at times these instances stretch me and force me to grow into a bigger person more than any explicit offer to do more at work.
Mom and I saw exhibits, indulged in fine dining and went dancing twice. This deluge of fun certainly forced me to confront my fear of changing routines, and my fear of wanting to be a more fun person. I learned that I could do all of these things and manage the aftershocks of something new without fully imploding. Routines and a fairly rigid schedule have helped me through really fraught and emotionally precarious times, but it feels like I have started to learn how to acknowledge that I am now doing well enough to soften them some here and there. I know it’s not revolutionary to skip a run on a Sunday morning because you went out on Saturday or to have a drink at the end of a workday, but I’m learning to reframe departures from what seems “correct” and “disciplines” as small acts of kindness and adventure for myself, which is a little revolutionary for me.
Did I concurrently learn how to be less anxious about getting a scientist on the phone within a few hours or how to leverage saying “our readers may ask” to get clearer answers out of them? For sure I did and my basic journalistic skills do feel like they are swelling up to something more strong and robust, but learning how to deal with myself as a person that has to exist even after I leave the newsroom just felt that much more impactful recently.
And I have started a big writing project that may not see the light of day for a long while, but is bringing me lots of joy and growth alike already. Pursuing it further even if I cannot quite share details will hopefully land me on a whole other, exciting and stimulating learning curve.
READING
This essay by Sable Yong on “effortless beauty” where she points out
“There’s no truth, authenticity, or morality to be gleaned from beauty; the simpler truth is that we are all googley-eyed goldfish who like looking at nice-looking things. The tension between performing beauty authentically while navigating a “necessary” amount of vanity is a tight one. Demanding authenticity from what is ostensibly the act of artful obfuscation is…unwise. Expensive injectables for the sake of looking naturally and undetectably refreshed for a semi-permanent amount of time makes a convenient, low-maintenance routine out of what’s considered a high-maintenance beauty treatment. Dramatic, full-beat makeup and fully coiffed hair that can be done at home and washed off at the end of the day reads as high-maintenance. The dissonance between the cause/effect of how beauty looks and how beauty is made renders authenticity and effortlessness irrelevant.”
I am someone who is rather prone to talking about authenticity on the Internet while also posting pictures of my very unnaturally painted, queer-clown-that-reads-comics face on every platform, so Yong’s observations hit home for me. Even more so, the recent “clean girl” trends that lean into a kind of artificial effortlessness that she is pointing towards in this essay have had me thinking about how we often conflate trying with being lesser because simply having things, beauty and wealth included, is seen as a sign of inherent worth and purity. Yong is explicit about this when, at the end of the essay she asserts
“The eternal glamor of preening, the constant ca-ching of self-optimization — Beauty™ is a self-perpetuating machine with the ability to exploit any narrative for social or economic gain, often at its own expense. It has less to do with actual beauty than it does economics and entertainment.”
I finished Joseph Osmundson’s Virology and kept thinking it was fantastic even after I closed the last page. I will write more about it soon, I promise.
This poem by Mary Howe where the lines
“This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.”
Feel incredibly, poignantly, life-like.
LISTENING
This Sadurn record and this album by MJ Lenderman because it seems like I am entering my white-girl-sad-indie era about a decade later than I was supposed to.
A friend of mine described Sadurn’s Radiator as camping music and I don’t think they are incorrect about it. It’s a mellow, nostalgic sound woven with somewhat tender lyrics about somewhat mundane experiences, a sonic version of light breaking through trees on the last morning of your vacation alongside someone you think you might love. Lunch and Special Power are my favorite tracks.
Lenderman’s Boat Songs at times packs more of a punch and at other times leans more heavily into a folky kind of humor, but this stylistic variation worked for me. Toontown was my standout song, but even the more tongue-in-check, sad-but-laughing tracks, like the one that opens the album, felt meaningful when it was all bundled together. I know the album is said to be dying as a concept, but in this case I thought the whole really was at least a little more than the sum of its parts.
This older boygenius record because Sadurn reminded me of their sound and we’re seeing Lucy Dacus in September. Salt In the Wound is still an emotionally brutal song.
This 1978 banger by Sylvester, on repeat, ever since we took my mom to a disco-themed club for a taste of Saturday Night Fever kind of New York (but populated with queer millennials).
WATCHING
While I was home alone during my partner’s trip I watched both Doctor Strange movies and the Moon Knight series. I am not a big MCU fan nor did I grow up on a diet of Marvel comics so I went into all of these pieces of content with expectations of nothing but light entertainment.
Moon Knight worked for me more than I expected though the first episode is slow and the rest of it is really a mashup of The Mummy, FX’s Legion and a weak attempt at a kaiju extravaganza in the season finale.
The first Dr. Strange movie left me pretty cold while the second, the one with the multiverse, and I am fully aware of how sprawling the story between them is, looked cooler so I paid a little more attention. The Sam Raimi of it all is a nontrivial factor in the second half of this film and all the moments of weaponized undeadness were both interesting and grotesquely amusing. This may not be a very good movie, all holes in the plot and nods at misogyny taken into account, but it was not exactly bad either. If there is ever a third one and I am by myself again, chances are I’ll fire it up.
Mom and I watched Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and I was pretty disappointed by it. Emma Thompson’s aging woman in search of a sexual liberation she’s not actually sure she wants is beyond cartoonish, a pile of stereotypes really, and Daryl McCormack cannot fully make up for forced dialogue with his sheer attractiveness. It is unclear whether a movie is trying to be an over-the-top sex comedy or something more serious, but it changes registers very quickly without giving its characters a chance to catch a breath and develop beyond predictable beats of humor, sadness and misunderstanding. I do appreciate the need for women over 40 to be horny and have that horniness be taken seriously on the big screen, but this was a very flat, lazy way to execute the idea.
My partner and I have been watching lots of Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series, which at the point we have reached towards the end of season 4 looks very good, but episodes vary in quality rather starkly from arc to arc, and a fair amount of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal which is all aesthetics and quite gory, but that’s what, somewhat counterintuitively, makes it very enjoyable.
To keep up with our intermittent obsession with heist movies, we watched the 1974 version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. This is a very New York movie, as what is more New York than being stuck in the subway with a bunch of discomforting characters, and it is appropriately fast-talking and quippy. The entertaining character work is, unfortunately, spoiled by an amount of sexism and homophobia that seems exaggerated even for the time when the film was made. Still, I was most disappointed by how abruptly the movie ended. After a very long setup the story just stopped which made all those offensive comments and moments of characters being aggressively witty feel mostly meaningless.
EATING
As a major indulgence, my mom, me and a very dear friend ate at HAGS in Manhattan’s East Village three days after they opened and had a truly amazing meal. HAGS is a fine dining restaurant owned and run by queer people who have a very public interest in transparency and inclusivity. If I was ever going to spend 300$ on a dinner, something I will likely not be able to afford again anytime soon, these are the folks I want to be giving that money to. I had the best cauliflower and the best tempeh I have ever tasted and even seemingly standard courses like a salad and a creamy dessert were full of attention to detail and, given that we were eating the vegan menu, executed with an exceptional richness and care. The price point is always a concern with this sort of dining, practically and as a larger proposition, but HAGS is pay-what-you-can on Sundays and I foresee making my way back there during many winter weekends when I am not fully, ecstatically overwhelmed by farmer’s market bounty.
Big platters of tomatoes from the farmer’s market vendors I return to every Saturday, served with all the accouterments, and all other late summer vegetables like zucchini and sweet corn, always paired with something fresh and crunchy like a butter lettuce or a radish drowned in lemon juice.
A vegan version of these burger buns where I replaced eggs with about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and one of maple syrup and this tahini banana bread where I went with a “flax egg” then glazed it with a mix of pulverized freeze dried strawberries, powdered sugar, cardamom, lemon juice and rose water. Both were fantastic, rich, sweet and savory all at once and, as a bonus, really made my mom happy.