Time Precision Abundance
Measuring in time has grown 10 trillion times more precise in the last 100 years.
Progress is a function of our ability to measure. Practically everything we use in our daily life works because of measurement science. Without precise measurements, our phones wouldn’t work, our cars wouldn’t run, and our hospitals couldn’t function.
Over the last 100 years, the precision of time measurement has advanced dramatically, driven by technological breakthroughs in clocks and timekeeping standards.
In the early 1920s timekeeping relied on mechanical clocks and pendulum-based systems, with the best accuracy around one second per day. Astronomical observations of the Earth's rotation defined the second but variations in the spin rate limited precision.
From the later 1920s to the 1940s quartz crystal clocks emerged, using the piezoelectric effect to achieve accuracies of about one second per month. The increased precision of these crystal clocks were a key advancement in radio and navigation.
In the 1950s and 1960s the development of atomic clocks marked a revolution in precision timekeeping. The first cesium atomic clock defined the second based on cesium-133 atomic transitions, achieving accuracies of one second in 300 years. Cesium-133 is a stable isotope whose atoms transition between two specific states—at a precise frequency—when exposed to microwave radiation. In 1967 the second was officially redefined using atomic transitions, thus moving away from astronomical standards.
During the 1980s to the 2000s cesium fountain clocks improved precision to one second in 20 million years. These clocks used laser-cooled atoms to reduce thermal noise, enabling applications like GPS and global time synchronization.
In the 2010s optical lattice clocks and ion clocks—using atoms like strontium or ytterbium—have pushed precision to one second in 3 billion years.
Recent optical ion clocks are accurate to one second in 30 billion years.
We improved precision in the last 100 years from one second a day to one second in 30 billion years. That would be a ten trillion factor improvement. This translates to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in precision of 37.13 percent. For comparison, Moore’s Law—the doubling of computing power every two years—has followed a CAGR of approximately 41.42 percent. Timekeeping has quietly rivaled computing in its exponential progress. Without being able to measure time with such precision, our computer technology industry wouldn’t have advanced. The difference between our age and the Stone Age is due in large part to our ability to measure time with such increasing exactness.
Learn more about our infinitely bountiful planet at superabundance.com. We explain and give hundreds of examples why more people with freedom means much more resource abundances for everyone in our book, Superabundance, available at Amazon.
Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a board member at Human Progress.
Hello Dr. Pooley. Thank you for this interesting data on time precision. I am about halfway through your course at Peterson Academy, as well as Superabundance, and am also now wandering though your contributions at Human Progress. The simplicity of your theory is devastatingly wonderful. I find I am struggling a bit to apply it to my reality, which is what causes me to write. I am sure my questioning you is foolish until I have completed both book and course, but I am struggling with the concept of using the production worker as the standard basis of comparison. I own a restaurant and work with skilled and unskilled labor. I was born the year of the cesium clock adoption when eggs were around 40 cents a dozen. Now let’s call them 4$, although I can purchase them for significantly more. The production worker wage does not apply to anyone in my employ, although the bartenders get close. Only 4 non-student-type people on my staff use their employment as their primary job. None are at production wage. I know measuringworth.com numbers are an average of millions. Across my life and wages, the time price of eggs has increased. I realize eggs have been on a weird journey lately, but eggs around here (New England) have stabilized since, since whatever you want to call that moment earlier this year/last year. I know many people living in this community who do not make production wage. Is it just that my industry is an outlier? Why is production wage an appropriate measurement for people in bulk, when many people in bulk do not earn that wage?
Very cool. It would be interesting to look at how much we have improved our ability to view details of distant objects in space. Auguste Comte declared in 1895 that “We will never know anything about planets except their geometry and dynamics.” And yet we can now determine the makeup of stars and planets light years distant.