Word: clock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...impact calorie-burning activities. For example, a 140-pound woman burns 111 calories walking at a moderate pace for 30 minutes. That sort of exertion, on a regular basis, could result in a hefty weight loss - and would produce significantly less strain on relationships than a round-the-clock regimen of snapping, bubble-blowing and chewing...
Technology also demands that time be measured ever more precisely. An accurate mechanical clock proved to be so valuable to the British maritime industry in the eighteenth century that the government awarded a hefty prize to its inventor, Joseph Harrison (a story elegantly told in Dava Sobel's 1995 best seller Longitude...
Behind its barred windows sit 28 atomic clocks, four of them holding atoms of hydrogen and the rest cesium. When excited by lasers or irradiated with microwaves, the atoms begin to dance with an utterly regular vibration that's monitored by computer. Once each second, the results are fed into America's Master Clock; the measurements from this and similar clocks around the world are sent to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures outside Paris--the ultimate timekeeping authority. It is there, next Friday, that the pulsing of billions of atoms will officially signal that civilization's odometer...
...even the most accurate clock in the world can't answer the question of what all these atoms are actually measuring. What is time anyway? According to Isaac Newton, both space and time were fixed attributes of the universe, a God-given stage on which events unfolded. But Albert Einstein torpedoed that idea with his theories of special and general relativity: the only thing that's fixed in the cosmos, he showed, is the speed of light...
...private he was just as confrontational. "I don't like this diplomacy s___," he whispered to an aide before a meeting with CBS Entertainment president Leslie Moonves in August. "We should just bring out the picket signs, bar the doors, get arrested and make the 6 o'clock news...