While people around the country are preparing champagne and getting ready to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, I’m closely monitoring our clocks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). 

We actually monitor them every nanosecond of every day, not just on New Year’s Eve. We have the duty to uphold the official U.S. time. There are many ways we get this time to the public, which we call “distributing” the correct time. We send out the time via satellite, radio signals, telephone lines, through internet protocols, and our web clock at time.gov.

 …