“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” ~ Albert Einstein

My son and I had a discussion on time and relativity last week. He is the type who asks what time is it every 15 minutes, especially when we are travelling. He asks what time  he got up, how long is cooking time for his favorite dinner and would often keep the timer of a movie on so he can see how long the movie was. He wants to measure everything by minutes and admittedly, that’s one of his obsessive-compulsions: He needs to stick around a rigid schedule or else he would feel like the day is a complete waste of time.

So we told him we would give him a watch so he would stop pestering us each time asking what time it is – which then brought us to the question, how does one measure time? And when fazed with a question like that, how do YOU answer that?

Frequency Control Devices are what would have done the trick. Being the nerd that I am, I actually researched about it and found out that timepieces, like radios, need crystal oscillators which look like this:

These actually stabilize everything, making sure timepieces clock away every second without losing any beat.

And you might also be amazed to discover that these devices are used in computer peripherals, industrial instrumentation, oil drilling, geothermal, commercial space, LAN/WAN, optical networks, process controls, telecommunications and wireless products!

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