[time-nuts] Rubidium standard

[Mike S]

At 03:24 PM 11/23/2009, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote...

>There are no "rubidium crystals" involved.

Next you'll try and tell us that you can't make a clock run backwards 
by using dilithium crystals, and making it warp time.

My understanding is that the Rb gets absorbed into the glass envelope, 
so that eventually there isn't enough to provide proper operation. Rb 
isn't that expensive (you can buy 1 g for $100 at retail - 
http://elementsales.com/pl_element_grp1.htm ), so I'm not clear on why 
they don't just put more than ~0.001 g in to begin with.

www.spectratime.com/product_downloads/life_mtbf.pdf