eli5: At the most basic level, how is a computer programmed to know how long a unit of time is?
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Imagine you are listening to the sound of a continuously bouncing football kept inside a small transparent box. Every time it bounces, you hear the sound non-stop.
Inside a computer, there is a tiny chip or material called a quartz crystal, which is made of silicon dioxide (SiO2), the same material that makes up sand and most rocks. Quartz crystals are piezoelectric, meaning that they generate an electric charge at precise and consistent intervals when subjected to an electric voltage.
Just like listening to the continuous bouncing of a football, in computers, there is a chip that senses the generated electric charge by this crystal. It sends this electric charge (signal) to all other chips that require this continuous signal to alter their own chip structure, which at a higher level is what we perceive as computation, processing, and programming.
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