Second - History - Modern Measurements

Modern Measurements

As a unit of time, the second (meaning the second division by 60 of an hour) entered English in the late 16th century, about a hundred years before it was measured accurately. Those who wrote in Latin, including scientists like Bacon, Tycho and Kepler, used the Latin term secunda with the same meaning as far back as the 1200s.

In 1832, Gauss proposed using the second as the base unit of time in his millimeter-milligram-second system of units. The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1862 stated that "All men of science are agreed to use the second of mean solar time as the unit of time." BAAS formally proposed the CGS system in 1874, although this system was gradually replaced over the next 70 years by MKS units. Both the CGS and MKS systems used the same second as their base unit of time. MKS was adopted internationally during the 1940s, defining the second as 1/86,400th of a mean solar day.

In 1956, the second was redefined in terms of a year (the period of the Earth's revolution around the Sun) for a particular epoch because, by then, it had become recognized that the Earth's rotation on its own axis was not sufficiently uniform as a standard of time. The Earth's motion was described in Newcomb's Tables of the Sun (1895), which provided a formula for estimating the motion of the Sun relative to the epoch 1900 based on astronomical observations made between 1750 and 1892.

The second was thus defined as:

the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time.

This definition was ratified by the Eleventh General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960, which also established the International System of Units.

The tropical year in the 1960 definition was not measured but calculated from a formula describing a mean tropical year that decreased linearly over time, hence the curious reference to a specific instantaneous tropical year. This was in conformity with the ephemeris time scale adopted by the IAU in 1952. This definition brings the observed positions of the celestial bodies into accord with Newtonian dynamical theories of their motion. Specifically, those tables used for most of the 20th century were Newcomb's Tables of the Sun (used from 1900 through 1983) and Brown's Tables of the Moon (used from 1923 through 1983).

Thus, the 1960 SI definition abandoned any explicit relationship between the scientific second and the length of a day, as most people understand the term. With the development of the atomic clock in the early 1960s, it was decided to use atomic time as the basis of the definition of the second, rather than the revolution of the Earth around the Sun.

Following several years of work, Louis Essen from the National Physical Laboratory (Teddington, England) and William Markowitz from the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) determined the relationship between the hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium atom and the ephemeris second. Using a common-view measurement method based on the received signals from radio station WWV, they determined the orbital motion of the Moon about the Earth, from which the apparent motion of the Sun could be inferred, in terms of time as measured by an atomic clock. They found that the second of ephemeris time (ET) had the duration of 9,192,631,770 ± 20 cycles of the chosen caesium frequency. As a result, in 1967 the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the SI second of atomic time as:

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

This SI second, referred to atomic time, was later verified to be in agreement, within 1 part in 1010, with the second of ephemeris time as determined from lunar observations. (Nevertheless, this SI second was already, when adopted, a little shorter than the then-current value of the second of mean solar time.)

During the 1970s it was realized that gravitational time dilation caused the second produced by each atomic clock to differ depending on its altitude. A uniform second was produced by correcting the output of each atomic clock to mean sea level (the rotating geoid), lengthening the second by about 1×10−10. This correction was applied at the beginning of 1977 and formalized in 1980. In relativistic terms, the SI second is defined as the proper time on the rotating geoid.

The definition of the second was later refined at the 1997 meeting of the BIPM to include the statement

This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.

The revised definition seems to imply that the ideal atomic clock contains a single caesium atom at rest emitting a single frequency. In practice, however, the definition means that high-precision realizations of the second should compensate for the effects of the ambient temperature (black-body radiation) within which atomic clocks operate, and extrapolate accordingly to the value of the second at a temperature of absolute zero.