I prefer the term I[diot] S[avant] and that’s being generous.

The standard thing to do is to build another one and compare the two: the stability of a single clock should be sqrt(2) smaller. If you have three clocks, then you can determine the stability of each clock. This doesn't tell you about systematic errors but physics comes to the rescue there because the influences that cause systematic frequency errors (magnetic fields, collisions, black body radiation ...) can be characterised and controlled.

I know you were just joking but ... it's not a clock. It's a frequency reference. A clock needs to run continuously and the state of the art 'clocks' like lattice clocks are not reliable enough to do this yet. Very good frequency references can be used to correct the frequency of less accurate clocks and this is what happens in the computation of Coordinated Universal Time. Time of day is computed from 400 or so continuously running hydrogen masers and caesium beam standards and then a very small correction is made using 'one second' as calculated from half a dozen or so extremely good frequency standards like caesium fountains.

Not quite. How do you set time of day? It's only a frequency reference, not a time reference. For time references, there's really only GNSS, dialup time services like ACTS and the various radio services (and maybe Iridium). The value of the CSAC, synchronised with GNSS, is that it will give you better holdover than the very ordinary crystal oscillator in your PC if GNSS is unavailable.
As for the frequency offset, the CSACs 'age,' that is their frequency offset increases with time, so that the time offset increases quadratically.

Back in the 1980's there was a reanalysis of some old gravity measurements made by Roland von Eotvos which suggested that gravity might have a short-range, composition-dependent component, a "fifth force". This inspired a number of experiments, with some positives and some negative results. Eventually, the positive results were all explained and the fifth force went away.

Coincidentally, in regard to this recent research, one of the hard to explain positive results also came out of UC Irvine.

Indeed not. Top pay for a scientific/technical position in the Commonwealth public service is about $130K.

Sorta. Larry Gritz, the author of BMRT, went to work for Pixar and then left to start his own company, Exluna, whose main product was a Renderman competitor called Entropy. Unfortunately Pixar's lawyers jumped on Exluna and Exluna was vaporised. BMRT and Entropy were no longer available after this. Larry Gritz went to work for Nvidia after that on a GPU-accelerated renderer, I think.

They are the official timekeepers for the US, along with the U.S. Naval Observatory (which also operates the timescale that GPS satellite clocks are steered to) but they are not timekeepers for the world.

The international standard for time is UTC, a 'paper' clock which is the average of atomic clocks from all around the world.

Nope. Although the system interrupt is only between a few hundred Hz and a kHz, other, faster counters are used to interpolate between these ticks. So on Linux, eg the Time Stamp Counter in the CPU can be used to improve the timestamp resolution to a microsecond, or even nanoseconds, with the nanokernel patch (which is standard in the BSDs, I think).

In my experience of operating a network of geographically-dispersed stratum 1 NTP servers, there is frequently asymmetry at the 1 to 2 s level and occasionally worse. An NTP implementation like ntpd filters out these outliers but the simple protocol you are suggesting would not.

PTP cannot account for network asymmetries any more than NTP can. It can only guarantee symmetric paths when all the hardware between two endpoints is PTP-capable, meaning that each boundary device has to implement a PTP clock.

In the end, it seems silly not to synchronise device clocks to a universal reference . There are many local applications which require a timestamp that must be compared with a time stamp on another device at some time down the line.

"You should try to keep up. :)"
I think the poster can be forgiven for not knowing about an alpha-release NTP client that only works on *nix at the moment (and was only released 3 months ago).

"network latency adjustment is automatic" - I don't understand this statement.
If you are only taking two time stamps - client transmit and server receive - then you have no information about the network latency.

>>Nope. I don't know anyone over 50 who knows how to build or repair a steam engine.
Amusingly, I know three, and one of them is under 50. But my sample is probably biased: the people I work with are all physicists or engineers.

I just read a SF story that used an idea like this - that analogous to the time dilation experienced as you fell into a 'normal' black hole, you would see spatial dilation as you fell into a black hole 'in time'. the idea that the universe is inside a black hole has been bandied about but I can't find a reference for the 'temporal black hole' idea ( I feel sure that the story I read was based on a scientific paper).