(My apologies to my subscribers who are seeing this for the third time.  My original post was accidentally deleted by my hosting company, so I had to republish.)

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Have you ever noticed that the time on your cell phone is often different than the time on your stove or other electric clock?  There's a good reason for that and it may get worse.

Cell phones and the landline telephone system (you remember Ma Bell, right?) run off of an atomic clock.  So do the Global Positioning System (GPS), the Internet, and many laboratories where timing of events is a critical part of the experiments.  Atomic clocks keep time for the entire world and are used because their accuracy is extremely high, and the systems that keep time by them need the accuracy.  The U.S. atomic clock is maintained by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology).

The electric power grid helps keep time another way.  Our electrical system in the U.S. operates at 60 cycles per second.  I won't go into the science of all this here, because I don't want to put you to sleep.  You can do research on the Internet if you want more detail.  Electric clock that don't use the atomic clock system rely on the number of cycles in the grid to be 60 per second.  These clocks count the cycles they see and change the time they display accordingly, one second per every 60 cycles.

The power grid has pretty good accuracy, so electric clocks do pretty well in keeping time, but the power grid is not as reliable as the atomic clocks, so that the stove clock doesn't keep time as well as your cell phone does.

OK.  Four paragraphs to get to what I want to tell you:  The people who run the power grid in the U.S. want to experiment with the frequency of cycles they transmit in order to determine whether or not they can make the grid more reliable.  This has nothing to do with keeping time better; it is about making sure that electricity can be delivered more reliably.  The experiment will involve moderating the number of cycles per second generated by the grid, and it will last for a year..

While I don't know the specifics of the experiment or how it will make power delivery more reliable, I know this - it will mess with your electric clocks, making them think time is passing faster than it truly is.  Therefore, your electric clocks will run fast.  This won't affect any clocks that run off the atomic clock.

The experiment is something deemed necessary, so it may very well go on.  I don't know when it is scheduled to start, but at some point you will be very annoyed that your clocks don't all read the correct time more frequently than they do now.

Just thought you'd want to know!

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