Without precise time, the modern world is collapsing – from GPS to the power grid. And Switzerland is one of the pioneers of this invisible order.

When the last seconds are counted down on New Year’s Eve, millions of people count on the clock on their cell phone, on their television or the clock in their church steeple. They all count together – five, four, three, two, one. But who really decides when exactly midnight is?

The answer leads to a world that almost no one knows about – and without which our modern daily life would immediately collapse.

Midnight is not about emotion. Nor is it determined by a single clock. The official world time is called UTC – Universal Time Cooperative. This time results from a global interaction of hundreds of high-precision atomic clocks, distributed in specialized laboratories around the world.

Your data circulates together at the BIPM (International Bureau of Weights and Measures) in Paris. A single bond time is calculated from all measurements. “It’s the benchmark that the whole world follows,” Steve Lecomte, member of the management team of the Swiss CSEM research center and head of the instrumentation sector, tells blue News. CSEM is active in the fields of micromanufacturing, digitalization and renewable energies, with its headquarters in Neuchâtel.

Switzerland is also part of this network: Metas, the Federal Metrology Institute in Bern, supplies temporal data to Paris. Swiss time is also directly integrated with world time.

In the past, it was enough to look at the sun. Later on a mechanical watch. Today, that is no longer enough. The reason: our world is highly connected, digital and automated. Billions of processes are running simultaneously – and they need to be perfectly synchronous.

Quartz watches, like those found in wristwatches, are practical but not perfect. “A quartz vibrates freely,” explains Lecomte. Temperature, pressure or magnetic fields can modify its frequency and thus distort time.

Atomic clocks get around this problem. They use atoms – often cesium – as a clock. These atoms always vibrate in the same way. Everywhere. “An atom is a universal reference. A hydrogen atom behaves the same way on Earth as it does on the other side of the universe,” explains Lecomte. This makes atomic clocks extremely stable.

A second seems trivial. In the world of high technology, this is gigantic. This is particularly evident with GPS.

Satellite navigation works by receiving signals from multiple satellites. The position is calculated from the transit time of these signals. Each satellite broadcasts its exact position and current high-precision GPS time based on atomic clocks. The receiver measures the signal travel time. 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 a nanosecond (a billionth of a second, editor’s note) The light travels about 30 centimeters. In order to be able to measure our position with an accuracy of about one meter, we need to determine the time with an accuracy of at least three nanoseconds.

This means: Even a small time error results in a position error. If the time was slightly wrong, your smartphone would suddenly point you down the wrong street – or hundreds of meters away.

And GPS is just one example. Mobile networks, internet nodes and power grids also depend on the exact time.

Electricity networks operate at a fixed frequency – in Europe 50 Hertz. This frequency must be synchronous everywhere. “If two waves are not synchronized, they cancel each other out,” explains Lecomte. Result: instability, breakdowns – in the worst case, damage or power outages.

Mobile networks work the same way. Thousands of antennas send and receive data. Without a common time base, data packets would collide. Videos stutter, phone calls drop, networks crash – especially during busy times like New Year’s Eve.

This is why mobile phone stations use time references from satellites and also protect themselves with local atomic clocks in the event of a satellite signal failure.

Data centers and cloud systems also need accurate time. Data is processed, compared and stored at the same time. Without precise synchronization, chaos reigns.

Although the market for atomic clocks is small, they are of extremely strategic importance. And this is precisely where Switzerland plays a central role.

A unique ecosystem has developed over the decades in Neuchâtel: universities, high-tech companies and research centers like CSEM work in close collaboration. Atomic clocks for telecommunications, satellites, navigation, military and science are created here.

“Certain atomic clocks on the Galileo satellites come from Neuchâtel,” explains Lecomte. Galileo is the European civil global satellite navigation system allowing very precise positioning and synchronization. Swiss atomic clocks have also been involved in historic projects, for example in synchronizing telescopes that made the first image of a black hole possible.

Switzerland’s political neutrality is an advantage. “Time is a strategic technology,” explains Lecomte. Countries want to remain independent. “China, for example, is reluctant to buy atomic clocks from the United States. » Swiss solutions, on the other hand, enjoy great confidence throughout the world.

Actually no. And that’s exactly what’s amazing. As long as everything works, we don’t notice how precisely time is measured. We browse, stream, make phone calls, pay – without thinking about it.

But if there was no time, chaos would be immediate. This is not a gradual effect, but a sudden collapse of digital systems. “Without atomic clocks, our current networked world would not be possible,” says Lecomte.

“Yes,” replies Steve Lecomte. Artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and decentralized energy systems require perfect timing. The reason: “Machines must make decisions simultaneously, compare data in real time and maintain the stability of networks,” explains Lecomte.

To toast at exactly the right time, you’ll probably need an atomic clock at home. But don’t worry: our smartphones are also extremely accurate. They continuously synchronize with official atomic clocks via the Internet (NTP server) or mobile networks (GPS signals), so deviations are only on the order of fractions of a second and are usually not noticed.

Even an atomic clock expert doesn’t think about nanoseconds at the end of the year: “Until now, I never needed an atomic clock to celebrate the New Year,” says Lecomte. And us, the laity? Like every year, we count down and make a toast. But it’s good to know that in the background, the most precise clocks in the world are ensuring that midnight is indeed midnight.