Deepak Jagdish, Macro Connections // Physics of IT // Spring 2013djagdish [at] media
0. Previous Checkpoints
May 4: understand the physics of time in a relativistic context such as GPS triangulation.
May 13: survey of existing works relating to representations of different scales of time.
1. What is the goal?
Understand the different scales of time involved in the creation and perception of ONE SECOND by a digital wrist-watch.
2. What questions will you answer?
What is the fundamental level at which time is created inside a watch?
What are the major components involved?
At what time scales do the different processes occur in the creation of a second?
What affects the error rate for a normal digital watch?
3. Techniques that will be used
This project is primarily a fact-finding mission, fulfiled by a survey of existing literature and methods that go into the making of a quartz-based digital watch.
Ideally, the end product of this effort would be a visualization, either in the form of an infographic or an interactive visualization. However, given the time constraints, the visualization aspect might have to be done at a later time since I've been spending more time on understanding the physical processes rather than just noting their event timescales.
4. Prior Art
5. Evaluation of Results
The resources used in figuring out timescales for different processes are not from a single source. For instance, my understanding of how a quartz oscillator works was from a source completely disconnected to the source from which how I understood propagation of light. In the end, if the figures that I discover satisfy the scales of different processes that we learnt in this class (especially chapter 1), then I would consider that has a simple validation of what I've learnt.