First Fix: It’s time to give time its due

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Timing — the unglamorous yet essential T in PNT (positioning, navigation and timing) — has been called “the invisible utility.” In fact, it’s been a long time since we last put a GNSS-timing receiver on the cover. (Partly that’s because, like with simulators, it’s hard to come up with a visually compelling image that conveys the role of such a device.)

From St. Augustine (“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”) to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (who argues that time is “part of a complicated geometry woven together with the geometry of space”), time is both one of the greatest mysteries of nature and one of our most practical concerns. For satellite navigation, time is both essential to its functioning and a fabulous by-product. As David Wells and Alfred Kleusberg wrote in the first “Innovation” column, in the first issue of this magazine, “One of the by-products of getting an SPS [Standard Positioning Service] position fix is that a clock in the user’s receiver is automatically synchronized to clocks in the GPS satellites to an accuracy of one ten-millionth of a second. Therefore, any GPS receiver is a very accurate time distribution device.” (“GPS: A Multipurpose System,” January-February 1990.)

As Richard Langley wrote in another early “Innovation” column, “Thanks to minute energy changes in individual atoms of cesium and rubidium, humankind possesses the ability to synchronize clocks anywhere in the world to better than 10 nanoseconds. But given this amazing ability to measure time, we still don’t know what time actually is.” (“Time, Clocks, and GPS,” November-December 1991.)

I procrastinated the task of writing this editorial and now another aspect of time is here to impose its claim: our production deadline. So, just one anecdote and a final quote, and I will be done, just in time.
The anecdote. A quarter century ago, during my first time around on this magazine’s staff, when Glen Gibbons was the group editorial director, Alan Cameron the senior editor, and I the managing editor, we had just one meeting a month, called “edit check,” a couple of days before the deadline to send each issue to the printer. We printed out all the pages, laid them down in order around a large conference room table, and walked around the table examining each one and making notes about small final corrections and revisions.

Only one page routinely had a large empty area: It was the one for Glen’s monthly editorial, which he always finalized (wrote?) at the last possible moment. I once joked that it would be blown in at the printing plant like the magazine’s subscription cards. Well, as I finish this editorial, we are at T minus two days for the November issue. Enjoy it!

Oh, and the final quote, again from Rovelli: “The events of the world do not form an orderly queue like the English. They crowd around chaotically like the Italians.”