Room Temperature

In Vienna they set a crystal a millimetre across at room temperature, no colder, and shone a light past violet, past seeing, until the thorium inside it began to answer, and they kept count.

In that nucleus two forces pull nearly level, one against the other, so the smallest give in either would show up as a change of beat. Some think a dark weather passes through us, too light to feel, and might do that.

So they ran it all day beside a clock of ordinary atoms and listened, from twenty seconds to a whole day, for one to slip against the other. Neither slipped. The paper calls this a constraint.

Here it is eleven degrees and grey, the air too still to turn a leaf, rain promised for the afternoon. The kettle takes as long as yesterday, which nobody will publish, and which held.