Two years ago this winter, I was trying to figure out why the high tide seems to usually fall on winter mornings where I live, and the low tide on winter evenings. I promised that if I solved this mystery, I’d post an animation about how it worked. But while reader Stephan Zielinski provided plenty […]
tides
This weekend the moon pulled back the curtains on the beach, revealing plenty of sand in the evening hours. I love the beach in the winter, particularly near dusk. The sand seems to go on for miles; when there’s a full moon, it rises from behind the mountains, which are still rosy from alpenglow. I […]
“In the 1960s we noticed there was a problem with time,” says Witold Fraczek, an analyst at Environmental Systems Research Institute in Greater Los Angeles. In 1948 Harold Lyons at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. built the world’s first atomic clock, an instrument that keeps time based on the vibration of atoms […]