Fireworks are set off at exactly 00:00:00 on New Year’s Eve throughout Switzerland.
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Without precise time, the modern world collapses – from GPS to the power grid. And Switzerland is one of the clock generators of this invisible order.
No time? blue News summarizes for you
- The exact midnight is determined by UTC world time, which is based on the measurements of numerous atomic clocks worldwide.
- Atomic clocks are essential for our digital infrastructure as they provide highly precise time, which is necessary for GPS, power grids, mobile communications and the internet, among other things.
- Switzerland plays a key role in atomic clock technology.
When the final seconds are counted down on New Year’s Eve, millions of people check the clock on their cell phones, televisions or church clocks. They all count together – five, four, three, two, one. But who actually determines when exactly midnight is?
The answer leads to a world that hardly anyone knows – and without which our modern everyday life would immediately collapse.
Who decides exactly when midnight is?
Midnight is not a matter of emotion. Nor is it determined by a single clock. The official world time is called UTC – Universal Time Coordinated. This time is the result of a worldwide interplay of hundreds of high-precision atomic clocks, distributed among specialized laboratories around the globe.
Their data flows together at the BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures) in Paris. There, a single, binding time is calculated from all the measurements. “This is the reference that the whole world uses,” says Steve Lecomte, member of the Executive Board of the Swiss research center CSEM and responsible for the Instrumentation division, to blue News. CSEM is active in the fields of microfabrication, digitalization and renewable energies and is headquartered in Neuchâtel.
Switzerland is also part of this network: Metas, the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology in Bern, supplies time data to Paris. This means that Swiss time is also directly embedded in global world time.
Why is a sense of time no longer enough today?
It used to be enough to look at the sun. Later, a mechanical watch. Today, that is no longer enough. The reason: our world is highly networked, digital and automated. Billions of processes run simultaneously – and they have to be precisely synchronized.
Quartz watches, such as those found in wristwatches, are practical but not perfect. “A quartz crystal oscillates freely,” says Lecomte. Temperature, pressure or magnetic fields can change its frequency – and thus distort the time.
Today, even church clocks usually work with atomic time by receiving time signals via radio from precise transmitters.
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Atomic clocks avoid this problem. They use atoms – often caesium – as clocks. These atoms always oscillate in the same way. Everywhere. “An atom is a universal reference. A hydrogen atom behaves the same on Earth as it does at the other end of the universe,” says Lecomte. This makes atomic clocks extremely stable.
One second late – what would really happen?
One second sounds trivial. In the world of high technology, it is gigantic. This becomes particularly clear with GPS.
Satellite navigation works by receiving signals from several satellites. The position is calculated from the transit time of these signals. Each satellite transmits its exact position and the current, highly precise GPS time, based on atomic clocks. The receiver measures how long the signal has been traveling. Multiplied by the speed of light, this gives the distance to the satellite.
But light is fast: around 300,000 kilometers per second. Lecomte calculates: “In one nanosecond (one billionth of a second, editor’s note), light travels around 30 centimetres.” In order to be able to measure our position to an accuracy of around one meter, we need to determine the time to an accuracy of at least three nanoseconds.
This means that even a minimal time error leads to a position error. If the time were only slightly wrong, your smartphone would suddenly direct you to the wrong street – or hundreds of meters off.
And GPS is just one example. Mobile phone networks, internet nodes and power grids also depend on exact time.
What do electricity, the Internet and mobile communications have to do with time?
Power grids operate at a fixed frequency – 50 Hertz in Europe. This frequency must be synchronized everywhere. “If two waves are not in sync, they cancel each other out,” explains Lecomte. The result: instability, failures – in the worst case, damage or blackouts.
Mobile phone networks work in a similar way. Thousands of antennas send and receive data. Without a common time base, data packets would collide. Videos jerk, phone calls break off, networks go down – especially at busy times like New Year’s Eve.
This is why mobile phone stations use time references from satellites – and also back themselves up with local atomic clocks in case the satellite signal fails.
Data centers and cloud systems also need precise time. Data is processed, compared and stored simultaneously. Without precise synchronization, chaos reigns.
The silent Swiss key role
Although the market for atomic clocks is small, they are strategically extremely important. And this is precisely where Switzerland plays a central role.
A unique ecosystem has developed in Neuchâtel over the decades: Universities, high-tech companies and research centers such as the CSEM work closely together. Atomic clocks for telecommunications, satellites, navigation, the military and science are created here.
“Some of the atomic clocks on the Galileo satellites come from Neuchâtel,” says Lecomte. Galileo is Europe’s own civilian global satellite navigation system for high-precision positioning and timing. Swiss atomic clocks were also involved in historical projects – for example, in the synchronization of the telescopes that made the first image of a black hole possible.
In March 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) presented the city of Neuchâtel with two replicas of the atomic clocks that equip the Galileo satellites. Here, Federal Councillor Guy Parmelin (left) and Francisco-Javier Benedicto Ruiz, Director of Navigation at ESA, pose.
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Switzerland’s political neutrality is an advantage here. “Time is a strategic technology,” says Lecomte. Countries want to remain independent. “China, for example, is reluctant to buy atomic clocks from the USA.” Swiss solutions, on the other hand, enjoy great trust worldwide.
Do we notice any of this in everyday life?
Not really. And that’s the amazing thing. As long as everything works, we don’t notice how precisely time is measured. We navigate, stream, make calls, pay – without even thinking about it.
But if there was no time, chaos would ensue immediately. Not a gradual effect, but an abrupt collapse of digital systems. “Without atomic clocks, our current networked world would not be possible,” Lecomte sums it up.
Will time become even more important in the future?
“Yes,” says Steve Lecomte. Artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and decentralized energy systems require perfect timing. The reason: “Machines have to make decisions simultaneously, compare data in real time and keep grids stable,” says Lecomte.
In Zurich’s Furttal valley, self-driving cars are currently being tested that will one day be used in public transport.
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Where do I look up the time on New Year’s Eve?
To toast at exactly the right moment, you’ll probably need an atomic clock at home. But don’t worry: our smartphones are also extremely accurate. They constantly synchronize with official atomic clocks via the Internet (NTP server) or mobile networks (GPS signals), so deviations are only in the range of fractions of a second, which you normally don’t notice.
Even an atomic clock expert doesn’t think about nanoseconds at the turn of the year: “So far, I’ve never needed an atomic clock for New Year’s Eve celebrations,” says Lecomte. And us amateurs? Like every year, we count down and toast. But it’s good to know that in the background, the world’s most precise clocks ensure that midnight really is midnight.
