Top Highlights

• “A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.” Humanity is now a species with one watch, and this is it.
• they needed a temporal measuring stick that would not stretch:
• we made measurements of a tenth of a second from day to day. That was great. Then more and more applications came in with greater refinements. It is like anywhere in life. When you have a capability, people find a use for that.
• communications—they have atomic clocks,” Winkler continues. “Television transmitters have atomic clocks. If you have two transmitters on the same channel, and you are between two cities, the picture will go up and down unless they are on exactly the same frequency. All good television stations have a rubidium clock.”
• “Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man,” laments the Czech novelist Milan Kundera,