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Timing Is Everything

  • David H. Silver(author)
Chapter of: Beyond Popular Science
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Title Timing Is Everything
ContributorDavid H. Silver(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0526.32
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.32
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightDavid H. Silver
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2026-04-08
Long abstract

Timekeeping has progressively moved toward smaller physical phenomena: from Earth’s rotation to pendulums, from crystal oscillations to atomic transitions, and now toward nuclear resonances. The SI second, defined by 9,192,631,770 periods of cesium-133’s hyperfine transition, relies on quantum interactions between nuclear and electronic magnetic moments. This shift to microscopic reference standards improves precision exponentially — hydrogen masers achieve stability of 1 part in 10¹³, while optical lattice clocks using strontium reach 1 part in 10¹⁸ by probing transitions at ~10¹⁵ Hz. The progression continues toward nuclear clocks using thorium-229, which promises precision of 1 part in 10¹⁹ by exploiting transitions in atomic nuclei rather than electron shells.

Print length10 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
THEMA
  • PH
  • PHQ
  • PHR
  • PDZ
BISAC
  • SCI055000
  • SCI015000
  • SCI057000
  • SCI061000
  • SCI075000
  • SCI034000
Keywords
  • Scientific storytelling
  • Conceptual physics
  • Modern physics explained
  • Relativity and quantum mechanics
  • Mathematics in science
  • Deep science for general readers
Locations
Landing PageFull text URLPlatform
PDFhttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.32Landing pagehttps://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0526.32.pdfFull text URL
Contributors

David H. Silver

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3071-304X

David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose career bridges computer vision, computational biology, and science communication. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biology at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology as a Rothschild Scholar, and was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for his doctoral work in computational biology at Cambridge, UK. Silver’s peer-reviewed publications span multiple domains: computational biology in Nature and PNAS; computer vision systems in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; medical AI in Human Reproduction and MIDL; and entertainment analysis in PLoS One. He holds over a dozen patents in depth sensing, medical imaging, and generative AI. His industry positions include Algorithm Engineer at Intel Corporation, ML Researcher at Apple, and CTO/co-founder roles at several technology startups. Silver maintains academic collaborations with researchers worldwide and serves as a peer reviewer for Image and Vision Computing and PNAS.

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UK registered social enterprise and Community Interest Company (CIC).

Company registration 14549556

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