Season 1 · Session 04
Relativity You Can Hold
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What breaks if we ignore that satellite clocks tick at a different rate than ours?
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Engineers had a choice. Build relativity's correction into GPS, or watch it fail within hours. The fix isn't optional. What does it mean that a technology millions rely on depends on time bending?
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The two corrections nearly cancel, but not quite. Gravity wins by about 38 microseconds a day. If they had cancelled exactly, would we have been slower to notice relativity was real?
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A second used to be a slice of Earth's spin. Now it's an atom counted out, carried on satellites, corrected for curvature. Did the second get more real, or more invented?
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How do you feel about this science and its understanding of reality?
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