Re: New artifact: The Silicon Sphere

From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Tue Dec 09 2003 - 15:38:09 MST


On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 01:18:01PM -0800, Tomaz Kristan wrote:

> Having an artifact (for reference) or no, that is a

All clocks are artifacts. But standards are supposed
to not be linked to specific artifacts, and good standards even not
to classes of artifacts.

> huge difference. We have a "natural" artifact for the
> second - it is a cesium atom. Then we don't need one

A second is about as arbitrary as choice of Cs, or Rb, or single
atom clocks/whatever comes next.

> for the meter. (The whole planet Earth once was.) Now,

Yes, but Earth is a lousy clock, as we found out a long
time ago.

> we can avoid artifact for the kilogram also. Just take
> a (cesium) atom an tell, how many of them are needed
> for a kilogram, or how fast 1 must travel.
>
> But there is another, even better way. Starting from
> the Plank's length. A certain number of Planck's
> lengths is a meter. A kilogram is a mass of a black
> hole with a certain number of Planck's lengths in
> diameter. A second is a certain fraction of time
> needed, for the unit black hole to evaporate.

It's interesting you chose to link mass to distance
via Planck scale.

My ad hoc time standard is a precise oscillator, which
counts in (chunks of) Planck time. The number of chunks
is limited by current technology implementation. The clock
also comes with an error range and spacetime curvature
compensation.

If you try to retrorelate events from there it gets increasingly
fuzzy, vice versa into the future (unless your chain
of progressively more precise oscillators gets disrupted
at some point).

> Good enough for the posthumanity? I doubt, but having
> something good, will be just essential.

Yeah, you got to have a scalable clock before you start
radiating outwards.

-- Eugen* Leitl leitl
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