Something You Should Know - Why We Keep Things We Never Use & The Reason We Keep Track of Time

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

How do you decide when the gas tank in your car is low enough that you need to stop and get gas? This episode begins by explaining why many of us wait too long and when the best time is to refuel. https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/07/27/2386931/ You probably have a lot of things in your home that you never use. You probably have a lot of things that you don’t even remember you have sitting in boxes. For many of us, getting rid of our possessions is hard - even things we have no use for. Yet, clearing out clutter can be a very freeing and satisfying experience. Here with some interesting insight and practical advice is Matt Paxton. Matt has spent 20 years helping people deal with their stuff. He was a featured cleaner on the TV show Hoarders and now hosts of the Emmy-nominated show Legacy List with Matt Paxton on PBS. Matt is also author of the book Keep the Memories Lose the Stuff (https://amzn.to/3tWDiyj). We all experience time passing. Yet how we keep track of time has changed. For most of human history, knowing exactly what time it is wasn’t that important. Yet, today we can keep very precise time and all of us agreeing what time it is, is necessary for the world to function. Joining me to talk about time and the fascinating story of how we keep track of it is Chad Orzel Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, NY and author of the book A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks (https://amzn.to/3H9lVOI) When you look at a car head-on, you have no doubt noticed that often times the front of the car resembles a human face and seems to give the car a personality. Sometimes it looks like a happy face, other cars have an aggressive face. Is that intentional or just a coincidence? Listen as I explain. http://www.fsu.edu/news/2008/11/26/car.personality/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Join the Moink Movement today! Go to https://MoinkBox.com/SYSK RIGHT NOW and get FREE filet mignon for a Year! Get a $75 CREDIT at https://Indeed.com/Something To TurboTax Live Experts an interesting life can mean an even greater refund! Visit https://TurboTax.com to lear more. Truebill is the smartest way to manage your finances. The average person saves $720 per year with Truebill. Get started today at https://Truebill.com/SYSK Take control of your finances and start saving today! To see the all new Lexus NX and to discover everything it was designed to do for you, visit https://Lexus.com/NX https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, how low should you let your gas tank get before you fill it up? Then, we all keep things in our homes we never use or even want. So why do we keep them? People keep things for different

reasons. One, they miss the person that the emotion is attached to on that item, or they think someone else in the family will value it, or they just want to have it just in case. What if I need it? And we have so many of those that we forget where they all are. Then, ever notice how the front of some cars resemble a human face? Is that intentional? And keeping time. For much of human history, we didn't keep precise time. But we do now. Why?

Because that's what powers the global positioning system. So anytime you use a navigation app, right, it's drawing on this constellation of atomic clocks and satellites to determine where you are on the surface of the Earth. And that works phenomenally well. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show.

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The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Here's a question for you. How do you decide when it's time to pull into the gas station and fill up your gas tank? It turns out that 75% of drivers say they use that display on their dashboard that shows miles to empty. They use that to determine that it's time to get gas. Now, AAA tested the accuracy of those displays and found that while in most cars that number is fairly accurate, it's probably better to think of it as an estimate rather than

exactly how many miles you have left before you run out of gas. The number can't be exact because it depends on factors such as speed, acceleration, and driving distance that you have yet to drive. And it's also likely based on historical data of how the car has been driven in the past. In general, AAA says you shouldn't go by that anyway in deciding when to get gas. They recommend if you wait until that light comes on that says you're low on fuel, you've waited too long. They recommend filling up the tank when it reaches a quarter tank. And their main reason is this. The fuel pump inside your gas tank is cooled by gasoline.

So the less gas you have, the hotter the fuel pump runs and the more wear and tear on the gas tank. And fixing that can be costly. And that is something you should know. One thing we all have in common is stuff. For some of us, stuff is no big deal. But for a lot of us, we worry we have too much stuff. And for some reason we find it hard to get rid of. For many, it calls to us, or maybe better said, it nags at us. When we see a room or a closet or a garage filled with stuff, it can cause stress because it represents a job we know we need to do,

namely clean it up, organize it, or get rid of it, and yet we don't. For over 20 years, Matt Paxton has helped people from all walks of life who want to live more simply. He was a featured cleaner on the TV show Hoarders, and he now hosts the Emmy-nominated show Legacy List with Matt Paxton on PBS. And he is all about helping people manage and improve their relationship with their stuff. He's also author of a book called Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff. Hey Matt, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hey, thanks for having me, man. Sure. So stuff is a problem. Many of us have a lot of stuff, so much so that we can't even fit it in our homes or garages. So we rent storage lockers to store our stuff. We have drawers of stuff we never use. We have racks of clothes we never wear. Yet we just can't quite seem to get rid of it. So what do you think, from your perspective, is this weird relationship between people and their stuff? Yeah, so for me, it's really interesting.

I mean, I've gotten to study stuff for the last 20 years. I've cleaned hoarded houses for 20 years. I've helped seniors downsize. I've helped families clean out a loved one's house after they've died. So I get all the different emotions that are attached to it. What I've learned to believe is when someone's life is full and complete with substance, with doing and giving and volunteering and family and people and love, well, then stuff doesn't really matter that much. But at the beginning of your life, when you're just trying to get anything and looking for a win,

that's when I feel that stuff means a little more. So we all have stuff. There are some people who have a lot of stuff. There are some people who have a lot more stuff. And then there are hoarders, and you know about hoarders. Do you think that these are all different degrees of the same thing, or is hoarding, is that more of a mental illness? And that's, that's not the same thing as just having a lot of stuff. You know, I was on hoarders, full disclosure. I was a cleaner on that show for gosh, 13 seasons. So I feel like I've seen it all. Um, I one time said I had a, had, we were cleaning a house out in New York city and the guy, there

was a, there was a homeless man living in the yard. So the hoarder had the house and the yard, and then a homeless man had kind of like jacked up in his yard. And I asked the guy, I said, man, how'd you get here? I was cleaning out his little shack. I said, how'd you get here? And he goes, well, I was a stockbroker, and this girl broke my heart. And I go, really? And he goes, yeah. And I was actually cleaning up a five gallon bucket of

human feces. I mean, so this is a very extreme mental disorder. And I go all of this over a girl and he goes, well, I got, I got addicted to crack too, but mainly the girl. And I laughed and I thought, well, gosh, we're all four or five decisions away from pooping in a bucket. And so that's where I put it. You know, right now it's very difficult for you and I to see how someone could, you know, be homeless in a shack, in a hoarder's yard and pooping in a bucket. But four or five bad things happen to us and we're there, right? And I could argue that number is even less. I mean, a couple bad things happen. And I'll just tell you the study. I mean, I was very lucky. I got to study hoarders

for almost 20 years. And so I really understand the extreme part of hoarding. And you're right. It is a disorder. They can't help it. What I'll tell you is they're good people. Bad things have happened to them. And they've gone to look for their happiness and self-worth in stuff. Yes, that is a very extreme situation hoarding is. But it's very common. I mean, it's 5% of the country. There's 19 million people that suffer from hoarding. So it's not a small number. I mean, there's more people out there than most realize.

You always have to wonder, so what's enough stuff? What's too much stuff? It seems like it's very subjective. Some people are just fine with a lot of stuff, and some people people aren't and, and who's to say they're wrong? Look, I'm a minimalist now. And I think I've got too much stuff. I mean, I was in my closet the other day. I'm up to eight t-shirts. Like that's too many. I don't really only need like four or five. And so like, I'm like struggling, like I gotta get rid of some of these t-shirts. And that sounds silly. But for me, at my point, at this point in my life,

that's too many. I have seven children. And so I've had, I've been forced to really, you know, in the last two years, it's a new blended family. And we went from, I went from three kids to seven. And so I'm really having to make very intentional decisions about living and getting rid of stuff because otherwise it takes over our life and we can't go do things. We can't have experiences. We can't have fun if we're just sitting at home taking care of our stuff. So I think my house is messy. I could go to someone else's house and then think, man, you only got eight t-shirts. Like, what do you wear? Like you got nothing. So it really is subjective. Right. Yeah. Well, people could argue that you're hoarding children now.

They do all the time. That's the number one joke I hear. And right. Okay. So let's go with that. Like, this is what I love about this. And this is, I think what really gets down to stuff serves your life for whatever your goals and your finish line are, right? Like, what do you want in life? And right now I wanted happiness. I wanted my kids to have lots of friends. I wanted my kids to have lots of experiences. I wanted them to see the world. And so we got rid of everything. We packed up and we moved eight hours away to Georgia to live with my fiance and her family. And we had to give up a lot of stuff to have those new experiences. And so that's my relationship with stuff now. It's like, okay, well, what am I going to give up? By the way, I almost didn't move because I was having such a hard time getting rid of my stuff. So what is your sense? And people talk about, oh, I have too much stuff. I need to get rid of stuff. I need to clean up. But are most people okay with their stuff? Or do you think this is, you know, one of those problems that people, you know, it's something to talk about, but it isn't really a problem or it really is a problem or what? I actually, that's a good, I think a lot of people are stressed by it, you know? So let's, like you said, let's go to the normalized world, but 95% of us just have a lot of stuff.

And I've found that specifically during the pandemic, people have looked around and said, man, this doesn't all serve me. Like, I don't really need this stuff. And they want a little more. People call me, it used to just be because something was bad. But now people call me because they want to make a change. They want more in life. And a lot of times their stuff is holding them back. They might be wanting to move. They might be wanting to age in place. They need to make space so that an adult mother can move in or an adult child can come in as a caregiver. I mean, they might be having another baby. Like there's all types of reasons they call. But the baseline is their stuff is holding them back from living.

And I think that most of us can relate to that. It might just be a closet that has too many shirts from a job we used to have. It might be a two-car garage that we can't get any cars into. Or maybe we can get two or one. But they just want something a little different or they want something more. And that stuff is what's your recommendation as to what I tackle first and what's the process I go through to start getting very serious about making more room and having less stuff? So step one is to really know what your goal is. And I call it the finish line.

Where are you going? Like, what do you really want here? And that's, believe it or not, really important. I mean, so many families call me, oh, we got to start decluttering. Great. What's the goal with this house? Oh, I don't know. Grandma's going to move in the next 10 years. Great. Let's get real clear because we don't know what grandma needs to take. What if grandma's not alive anymore, right? So I get really clear on that goal. What's that finish line? What are we doing? And then the why. And the why is actually really important. And so this is more philosophical at

the beginning than how to start cleaning. Because you've got to have something to come back to, right? When I compare it to weight loss. It would seem to me that most people get a bug to clean out their stuff because they want to clean out theirs. They just want to get rid of stuff. There is no big goal. There's no grandma's not coming. It's just, we've got too much stuff. It would be nice to clean this out and get a little more room rather than some big profound goal. Okay. Profound is the right word. Is every situation profound? No. But this step number one about understanding your finish line and the why, it's important because you'll quit. Otherwise cleaning is pretty much the easiest thing to quit at cleaning and exercise. And so this step is first on purpose because I want you to set a goal that you come back

to when you're ready to quit. And you're right. It may not be, you may just need to get rid of 10 t-shirts and that's fine, but you got to understand what you, what your goal and that, and that goal is simply, I just need space for more t-shirts. I bought a bunch of new t-shirts at a concert and I want to get rid of some. Great. That's about as simple as it gets. But you got to get clear on that or otherwise you quit and you don't finish it. And then now you got 20 t-shirts, not 10. And so I'm really, really clear on the, even if it's small, you got to have a goal. You got to know what you're

doing there and you got to stick to it because otherwise you'll quit. Okay. So I have a goal. Now what? All right. Now start small. That's the second biggest mistake. People try to tackle it all in one minute. And you know, I don't care how small or how big the situation is. You didn't do it in a weekend. It typically took a while to clean it or to fill it up. And so I say, start really small. Like I love the junk drawer in the kitchen. She's like top left of the Island and it's filled with rubber bands and cards and pens and checks and papers. Um, start there, start with one bookshelf, start with, um, like one shelf, start with one, you know, one foot area by one foot area in the garage, whatever area you're looking at, start really small and complete it. And the

reason I say that is you need to visually see that you can do it or otherwise, again, you'll quit. And when you go open that junk drawer, what is it that you actually do? Because I think people's image is that, well, you're, you know, clearing it out, throwing everything away or donating it or whatever, but you're not throwing out everything. So what's the process of, I pick this up and what do I do with it? Um, I, you know, it's silly. You need to put items, every item has a home and it needs to go where it, where it needs to go. And that that's your food goes in the kitchen. It's really important that your tools and stuff go where the tools go. It's important your clothes go to where your clothes are going. What happens is we get so busy and we get focused on other things that we don't finish

that task. And most of my clients are 95 percenters. And most of you live with a 95 percenter. They will do really well on the first 95% of the task. And then they just don't finish. They either go on to the next one or they just stop for some reason. And I can't stress how important, regardless of the size of the organizing or the cleaning, you've got to finish small. And so as I really say, start small and then finish that task and then be proud. Like that sounds silly. Like look at the space and be like, okay, I did it. Like, even if it's just your kitchen pantry, complete the entire task and then move on to the next one. Because you need that finished one to hang on to when you get to the next task.

We're talking about all your possessions, all the things in your house, particularly the things that you keep that you never use or look at and what to do with them. And my guest is Matt Paxton. He's host of the Emmy-nominated show Legacy List with Matt Paxton on PBS and author of the book Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network

called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Matt, don't you find, though, and you gave the example of the kitchen pantry, and this is one I've done. And I put myself somewhere on that scale, somewhere in the middle. You know, I'm not real neat. I mean, I'm not like a minimalist like you, but I can't stand a mess. And I've done the pantry thing where I've gone through and I've cleaned it all out and the soups and the beans and the things are all facing forward and they're in alphabetical order in it. And a week later, yeah, not so much.

And a couple more days and it's not so much. And pretty soon it's back to the way it was. Yeah, that's pretty much all of us. I mean, I'm a minimalist because I have to be. I'm messy. How do you keep it that way? Just because you clean it doesn't mean it stays that way. How do you maintain it? So it is a maintenance thing. And so the maintenance thing for me is one I call equal in, equal out. Once you've cleaned it, the pantry is a great example. You got to stay on top of it. And so when I bring something in, something of the equal size or shape

has to leave. So I either donate it or consume it. Shoes when I bring something in, something of the equal size or shape has to leave. So I either donate it or consume it. Shoes, this is a tough one for shoes, right? Because I know people who keep shoes for 20 years. They wear them one time. I was with a lady, a person a couple weeks ago, and she's like, oh, I wore those shoes to the Emmys. I was like, great, when?

She's like, 90 something. I go, have you? So they're over 25 years old. I go, have you worn them since? No. I go, okay, well, you got a brand new pair of shoes. Let's donate those Emmy shoes. She's like, no, I don't want to donate them. They're really nice. I go, great. If they're so nice, why haven't you worn them in 25 years? And what we settled on was donating them to a group that has the mission that she cares about. It was a workforce development group where these was called Dress for Success. And these women were able to go get jobs and interview and look nice.

And so she was able to give these shoes to a group that that really mattered to her. And so now all of a sudden she could follow that rule that equal and equal out because she had a place where these things of in her mind of mental or sorry, emotional and financial value could then be given away. It interests me that, you know, people keep stuff because they, you know, they say it has sentimental value that they want, they don't, just can't bring themselves to get rid of it. And so it gets stuck in a box or stuck in a drawer or stuck in a closet and they never look at it. They never see it. They never touch it. They probably don't even remember they have it until they see it the next time in four years, but they can give it away. So what is that? What is it that I don't, I have no use for it. I don't care about it as long as I think it's in the house somewhere. So that's the memory,

right? That's the memory that matters. It's like, oh my gosh, yeah, that was my dad's. It's really important to me. Great. Where is it? Well, it's either in the storage unit or above the garage, or I don't know, I'm not really sure. And you get this really, you know, important story of how amazing it is and how valuable it is. And then they can't find it. And that's, believe it or not, that's what my TV show legacy list is about. We help people relocate a few, you know, a few important items in their house. People keep things for different reasons. One, they miss the person that the emotion is attached to on that item. Or they think someone else in the family will value it and want it.

Or they just want to have it just in case. What if I need it in five years? What if I need it in ten years? And we have so many of those that we forget where they all are. An experience that I often have, and in fact, just had it today when I was cleaning out a cabinet of stuff. And there was stuff in there that I'd long forgotten about and that I don't need. But there was something wonderful about rediscovering it. It was, well, a couple of pictures and a few things that, you know, from my old days in radio

and, and it was like, it was just very pleasant. And if I had gotten rid of all that stuff, I would never have that experience of kind of re-surprising myself of, oh, look at that. Oh, that's so nice. Yeah. That's, that's actually one of the best parts of, oh, look at that. Oh, that's so nice. Yeah, that's actually one of the best parts of downsizing and decluttering is like actually finding things that matter. Now, the question is, do you keep it to do that again in 20 years? Or do you enjoy the moment, share the story with whoever you're with, and then let that item move on to another place? Do you discard it? Or do you keep it? or do you donate it? But if you do that with all of those things, you won't be able to do it again.

Correct. And the goal is not to get rid of everything. The goal is to get rid of enough so that you can share the really important items. I remember reading, or maybe I interviewed somebody about this, that there is some evidence, some research that says that when people clean out their stuff, when they get rid of all the junk in their house and really downsize their stuff, that they also tend to lose weight. Has that been, since you've done this so much, has that been your experience? You know, I don't study that, but I've seen it. I think it's very true. It's the easiest thing to compare organizing to.

But where I'll take that is stuff is something that weighs on our mind, right? It's just another task, another thing I've got to do, right? The decluttering that we never get to. And so once you do that, you've taken a huge weight off your shoulders, and you taken a huge amount of time and you've also proven to yourself that you can do things that are difficult. And so I can absolutely see why people have done that because it frees up time in your life and it frees up anxiety in your brain and it teaches you that you can focus and you can achieve. And I mean, I'm afraid so many of my answers are getting really preachy, but like, yeah, like you're decluttering teaches you the skills that you can do it. And so it makes total

sense that people go next on to weight loss and don't get me wrong. Cleaning out a house is whether it's just a room or a closet, guest room closet, it's still a relief and it's still an accomplishment and you're better off than you were yesterday. And you're probably happier than you were yesterday. What you just said a moment ago I think is so important. We probably should have discussed it at the very beginning. And that is that when you see a room that's cluttered or a closet or a drawer, that the clutter represents a job you have to do. Because you know at some point you're going to have to do it. And it represents this job that you have to do that you haven't done. And that's what causes the stress. Yes? Exactly. And some of us look at that as failure.

If it's more things I don't have time to do, then that weighs on me mentally and it slows me down even more. So it's my sense that there are basically two things that keep people from cleaning out that drawer or that closet or that garage. And they are, first of all, that it doesn't seem like any fun at all. And sooner or later, it's all going to get junked up again anyway. And secondly, is that fear of throwing away or donating stuff that you're really going to miss, that you're really going to want, that you're really going to need later on. And as somebody who not only helps other people, but has done this for themselves, what do you say to that? I got rid of all my, I got rid of 85% of myself. I was so afraid if I got rid of all this stuff and this place and this, this thing, I would miss it all. And here we are a year and a

half later, I don't miss any of it. And we moved to a house that had a smaller yard. And so I have less stuff to take care of. I have less maintenance of my house. I have more time to do things with my family. And by the way, I have more money in my checking account because I'm not buying a bunch of crap I don't need. And I left a lot of stuff behind. And that's okay. Well, I don't know anybody that doesn't have some issues with their stuff. And well, even you, you're the guy who helps everybody else declutter and downsize and get rid of their stuff. And you've admitted that you've had your own issues managing your own stuff. So clearly, it's a universal problem, and it's good to get some perspective and advice on it.

Matt Paxton has been my guest. He hosts the Emmy-nominated show Legacy List with Matt Paxton on PBS. He was a featured cleaner on the TV show Hoarders for quite a while, and his book is called Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for being on

Something You Should Know. Thanks, dude. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong. Each week we deliver four fun-filled shows.

In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm

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So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Every day, every hour, every minute, every second, you are experiencing the passage of time. And we have become pretty good at keeping track of time as it passes. But it wasn't always that way. In fact, how humans have kept track of time until fairly recently hasn't been all that accurate at all.

And yet now, the way we track time is extremely precise. Chad Orzel is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and he's author of a book called A Brief History of Timekeeping, The Science of Making Time, From Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. And he's here to talk about the fascinating story of how we keep track of time. Hey, Chad, welcome. Thank you for having me on.

So when did people, at least as far as history can tell, when did people start trying to keep track of time as it passes? It's at least, you know, 5,000 years ago that people are building monuments that are still around today that function as a kind of clock. They mark the position of the rising or setting sun on particularly significant days in the position of the rising or setting sun on particularly significant days in the course of the year. So it's a long time before written language that people got the idea of keeping track of time and started building, constructing monuments and so

forth to do that. And is there any sense of what people's definition of what they thought of time being? Has it changed or is time just time and we always kind of intuitively understand what it is? I think, you know, it's hard to read the minds of people long ago. But the, you know, the clear important purpose of this is, you know, you have things like the Newgrange Monument outside of Dublin in Ireland is this giant artificial hill with a passage into it and a central chamber that gets light only one day out of the year. The rising sun on the winter solstice casts light all the way into the central chamber. And the importance of that is really, really clear because that's the, that's the shortest

day of the year in the Northern hemisphere. That's as dark as it's going to get, right? From there forward, the days are going to start getting longer. The weather is going to eventually start getting warmer. That's sort of a very important marker for an agrarian society of, you know, this is the time when we need to start thinking about the future, thinking about, OK, we got to get stuff ready for spring. I imagine that for a long time, time as people experienced it and needed it to get along was kind of a ballpark guess. I mean, my clock didn't need to match your clock to the second in order for us to all kind of get along. We all kind of knew when the sun came up and the sun went down and that's a pretty recent thing. Exactly. It's, you know, for most of human

history, you know, the vast majority of the recorded and, you know, all of the unrecorded history, time was a very local thing, right? You're measuring time by the position of the sun in the sky or the position of, you know, the stars of the moon at night. And that's tied to a particular place, right? It's different times of day at different locations on the surface of the earth. But that didn't really matter to anybody because nobody could go far enough for there to be a significant difference in what time it was, you know, fast enough for that to matter. It's really not until the 1800s and, you know, particularly in the U.S. that you start to really get into issues where people, once the railroad system is fairly well established, people can go far enough in a single day that the time of sunset changes by a significant amount. You know, just before the Civil War, you could get from New York City to Ohio and sunset's a good half hour later

in Ohio. So then you have to start worrying about, OK, how are we coordinating things over these big distances? But prior to the 1800s, right, it was perfectly fine for everybody to have, you know, their local clocks showing slightly different times because no one was ever going to interact with anyone whose time was significantly different. When did the concept of days, weeks, months, hours, minutes, when? How did that all start to gel? Counting days is pretty straightforward. As far back as we know, everybody's keeping track of that. The seven-day week, that's a Western thing that comes out of Judaism and Christianity, and that's kind of unique in that respect. Dividing the year up into months is something that happens kind of the same way all over the world. Most cultures have sort of a 12 or 13 month calendar of some sort. And that's because of the moon, right? The moon is one of the

brightest objects in the sky. And it goes through, you know, the cycle of phases once a month. And, you know, it takes about 29 days to do that. So there are just over 12 full moons in a year. So, you know, pretty much every culture has some sort of 12-ish division of things. The division into hours and minutes and so on, that happens largely in sort of parallel to the months, right? So people tended to split things up into like 12 hour days because you have sort of, you know, 12 month calendars and they just mirror each other. Talk about when the whole idea of keeping track of time with a device, with a clock, with something resembling a clock, when did that start and how did it start?

The earliest thing that's really genuinely a clock is a water clock. And those go back thousands of years. And it's a vessel that looks kind of like a flower pot. It's sort of a tapered pot. And you would fill it up with water. And it has a small hole at the bottom. So the water drains out very slowly over a period of 12 hours, something like that. And there are markings on the inside of this alabaster container that designate different hours through the course of the night. So you would fill this up at sunset, and then it would tell you as time went along, where are you in the course of the night? But you can also turn it around and use this on a cloudy day, right? When a sundial isn't going to tell you, if you can't see the sun, you can't tell

what time it is by the sun. But you could use one of these water clocks to do that. And those were the state of the art in timekeeping all the way up into the 1500s. And then what happened? Sometime in around 1200, 1300 in there, people started to invent mechanical clocks. And the first mechanical clocks weren't really very good. They tended to really only have our hands because they were sufficiently inaccurate over the course of a couple of days that there really wasn't any point in dividing it more finely than that. In the mid-1600s, people worked out how to make a pendulum clock, how to make a and that's a really good kind of clock. You can make a mechanical device that's based on the swinging of a pendulum.

It ticks once per swing of that pendulum. And that will keep time to, you know, within 20 years of the first mechanical clock, people had pendulum clocks that were good to, you know, a second a day, right, that kind of level. That starts to enable some really interesting things. People doing astronomy find this incredibly useful because, you know, part of the way you measure the position of things in the sky is by keeping track of time. And so if you know, you know, at what time was this star directly overhead, that gives you information about where that is, that lets you map things with greater precision. And that leads to a lot of advances in astronomy and navigation and things like that. And so now we have things like atomic clocks. And as I recall,

you know, there are times when the clock stops because the Earth is slowing down. And who's doing all this? Who says so? Who says that this is the time? Yeah, it's a fascinatingly bureaucratic process in the end. There's a collection of national standards laboratories all around the world. We have a couple that contribute in the United States. There's the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., and there's the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder.

They both maintain atomic clocks that they keep track of what time it is continuously. There also there's PTB in Germany. There's the National Physical Laboratory in the UK. There's pretty much any major country has at least one standards lab with state-of-the-art atomic clocks that maintains a local time. All of those organizations report to a group that's called BIPM, which stands for the French abbreviation for the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. And they combine all of these measurements to sort of form a consensus average. The decisions about whether to add a leap second at the end of the year,

right? Every now and then you get these stories that, you know, this year on December 31st, we're going to count, you know, 1159, 59, 1159, 60, and then midnight. Those leap seconds get added by a group that I'm going to mess up their name now, but it used to be called the International Earth Rotation Service. They monitor the motion of stars very carefully. And based on that, they keep track of the rotation of the Earth. And every now and then, the Earth is gradually slowing down. So every now and then, they add a second to sort of keep in sync with so that the stars are where you expect them to be. And when they do that, I mean, I imagine they all get together at some point. There must be a conference somewhere.

Do they argue about stuff like this, or is it all pretty much, yeah, that's fine? The organizations, you know, they meet several times a year. There are provisions for potentially adding up to four leap seconds per year. The most they've ever done was in 1972 when they first implemented the system. They added two. They added one at the end of June and one at the end of December.

Since then, they've only, it's every few years they add one at the end of December. They make the decision about whether to do that a couple of months in advance so they can warn everybody, so that everybody who maintains clocks knows that, okay, we're sticking an extra second in. Something I have always wondered is, you know, you can buy an atomic clock. I have an atomic clock right on my wall here. It keeps really good time because it's getting a signal from the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado.

But I guess what I don't understand is what is atomic about it? How does atomic anything make a clock more accurate or what's an atomic clock? An atomic clock is, it might better be thought of as a light clock. And the idea is that the electrons inside an atom have these certain allowed energy states that they can be in. And they absorb or emit light as they move from one state to another. And the frequency of the light that they absorb or emit depends on the energy difference. That energy difference is determined by the laws of physics, right? So if you pick two energy levels in a particular atom, right, what we've done is we've defined the second in terms of two states in a cesium atom. Then the light that, you know, is emitted by any cesium atom anywhere in the universe moving between those two states will be absorbed

by any other cesium atom moving between those two states anywhere else in the universe. What the clock actually is, is a source of microwaves at a particular frequency. It's 9,192,631,770 oscillations per second. And you make microwaves at that frequency and shine them on cesium atoms and see, do the cesium atoms absorb these? And if we've got the frequency exactly right, then the cesium atoms all move from one state to another. And you can tell that and you say, okay, the clock's working well. If the frequency is a little bit off, it's arranged so that some of the atoms don't make the transition. You see that and you say, okay, we need to correct the frequency.

And then you just repeat this sequence over and over. You check the frequency of your microwaves against the cesium atoms about once a second when the clocks are in operation. And that allows you to keep adjusting the frequency and get it so it's dead on and stays that way, you know, at a level where you would need to operate this continuously for something like a billion years before you would gain or lose a single full second. So what you just described doesn't sound anything like what I consider a clock.

So how is it a clock? How is the atomic clock a clock? Because what you just described sounds more like some, you know, people in a laboratory doing things with atoms. I have a friend who works at the Naval Observatory. He'll get a little annoyed at me calling them clocks sometimes because they're really, they're frequency standards. They're not operated continuously. So, you know, they turn those on every now and then they do a really exceptionally good measurement of the cesium frequency. And then they convey that information to the clocks that work as clocks that are on 24, seven, three 65. And, uh, those operate at a slightly lower precision. Um, but you know, they're but they're incredibly robust and they operate almost automatically.

They're continuously run for months at a time, evaluation and correction of these lower precision ones that form most of the ensemble, and that's what gets reported to BIPM. Well, your explanation is very thorough. I'm not sure I understand it completely, but it points to the fact that this is a lot, seems like a lot of effort to get very, very precise. And I understand the need for some precision, but this seems to be extreme precision. So there must be a reason for it. There may be several reasons for it, that it's this precise. That level of precision, the reason that we put in that effort and get that level of precision is that's what powers the global positioning system. So anytime you use a navigation app on a phone or

in your car, right, it's drawing on this constellation of atomic clocks and satellites that are broadcasting the time. And it uses those time signals from different satellites to determine where you are on the surface of the earth. And that works phenomenally well, right? You can get, you know, if, you know, if you play like the silly little Pokemon game where you, you know, you walk around and catch things, it knows where you are on the surface of the earth to within, you know, 10, 12 feet. You need nanosecond timing to be able to get that. And we have that because of these cesium atomic clocks. Not being the scientific type, that baffles me somewhat because you're using time to discover where. To me, time is when, not where.

So the way it works is a lot like the way we give direction sometimes. So I teach at Union College, which is in Schenectady, New York. Not many people know where Schenectady is. So we can tell them where it is by giving them a couple of time references, right? I say, well, we're three hours from Boston and we're three hours from New York City. Now, each of those statements puts us on, you know, somewhere on a circle that's about 180 miles in radius centered on those cities. And there's only two places on the surface of the earth where those two circles intersect, right? One of them is Schenectady, the other is in Long Island Sound. So, you know,

you can figure out which of the two it is from common sense, or you can add in that we're also four hours drive from Montreal, right? And there's one and only one point on the surface of the earth where those three circles intersect. What we're doing with GPS is a similar idea. You have, you pick up time signals from these satellites in orbit. And if you have, you know, four satellites, you can get, okay, this one is delayed. You know, the signal from this one arrived a little later than the signal from that one, a little earlier than the signal from that one. And that gives you the distances to the satellites, which because we know the speed of light, and that enables us to

identify a single point on the surface of the Earth that is that distance away from each of those satellites. And that's how GPS pinpoints your position to within, you know, a few meters. So as somebody who studies time scientifically, what is the definition of time? I've never, I don't think I've ever really heard a good definition of time, and maybe there really isn't one. But how does science define time? It depends a lot on, you know, what sort of scientist you're talking to. So I'm my background is in experimental atomic physics. And so I'm pretty comfortable with the sort of operational definition of, you know, time is what you measure with a clock and a clock is just a thing that ticks. Right. So anything that does some regular repeated action, I count how many times it does that.

And I say, well, it took six of those ticks between this event and that event. And that's what I'm measuring with the – that's time. That's what I'm measuring with the clock. Someone who does general relativity will tell you that, well, time and space are different aspects of the same thing, of the space-time. And that's bent by gravity and you have to think about it as more of a fluid individual kind of thing, which is a little harder to understand. There are even people who think about, you know, is there sort of an eternal now that is the only thing that really exists and the past is gone and the future hasn't happened yet?

Or is time best thought of as this giant four-dimensional structure and we're only perceiving a narrow slice of a whole that already exists, right? From the very beginning of the universe up to the end of the universe is something that's already out there. It's fully determined. And we're just perceiving a moving slice through that. I always just default to the operational definition, right? Time is what you measure with a clock, and a clock is a thing that ticks. But it only goes one way. It only goes one way. Uh, sadly that that's, that's the, you know, the great conundrum of, of time as, as a dimension in particular. Uh, if you, if you take that view, right, we can only move in it in one direction. Uh, and that seems weird. Seemingly time is constant. You know, it takes a second for a second to go by.

It takes an hour for an hour to go by. Time goes by at the rate of time. Is that always true? There is a sort of an aspect in physics where, you know, depending on how you're moving, the theory of relativity tells us that it's really literally true that time runs at different rates for people who are moving relative to one another. Now, if I have two identical clocks and one is with me and the other is moving past me at a good fraction of the speed of light, the one that I see going by, I will see that clock ticking more slowly than the identical one that I have with me. And that's a very real effect that's been measured, again, to phenomenal precision using these atomic clocks. So there is a physics

sense in which it's genuinely true that everybody has their own internal time that's different. That depends on how you've moved in the past, what time you think it is. And is there any sense that when time started, when time will end, did time always exist? Did it start with the Big Bang? Where did it come from? Yeah, in the sense of, you know, time is an element of space-time, right, this relativistic theory, we have a very good idea of when the universe as we know it came into existence. And we can say with some confidence that the space-time that we currently inhabit came into existence around 13.7 billion years ago. Now, what exactly happened to bring that into existence? Did it just appear out of nothing?

Was there time before that? Those are questions that are, you know, almost as much theological as scientific. Well, while we all might experience time differently, we're all moving through it together at the same time. And it's really interesting to understand or to get some concept as to what time is, how we keep track of it, how precise we've gotten in keeping

track of it. It's really interesting. Chad Orzel's been my guest. He's an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and he is author of the book, A Brief author of the book, A Brief History of Timekeeping, The Science of Marking Time, From Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. And if you'd like to read that book, I have a link to it in the show notes for this episode. And I appreciate you being here. Thanks, Chad. Thank you for having me on. I'm always happy to take a little time to talk about this. If you drive a car and look in the rearview mirror, or if you look at cars head-on,

or if you've seen the movie Cars, you know that the front end of a car often resembles a human face. And those expressions on the front of cars are there not by accident. For example, the Volkswagen Bug looks wide-eyed and friendly. The Ford Mustang's long hood and narrow headlights have male features that look more aggressive and auto designers take that into consideration to appeal to their target customers. What's interesting, though, is that other drivers react to those facial expressions on the front of cars. For example, it's human instinct to get out of the way

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