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Physicists have said they have fine-tuned an atomic clock to the point where it won’t lose or gain a second in 15bn years – longer than the universe has existed.
The “optical lattice” clock ( http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150421/ncomms7896/full/ncomms7896.html ), which uses strontium atoms, is now three times more accurate than a year ago when it set the previous world record, its developers reported in the journal Nature Communications.
The advance brings science a step closer to replacing the current gold standard in timekeeping: the caesium fountain clock that is used to set Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the official world time.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/22/record-breaking-clock-invented-which-only-loses-a-second-in-15-billion-years
[Also Covered By]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/22/8466681/most-accurate-atomic-clock-optical-lattice-strontium
(Score: 2, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday April 22 2015, @09:14PM
The damn thing won't last that long, so how could it be accurate at that scale?
Was going to suggest that maybe we should get these Physicists to move on to some more immediate problems. Seems like they have let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:07PM
Because what they actually have is a clock with an overall systematic uncertainty of 2.1x10^-18, which you'd know if you'd actually bothered to RTFA. The mainstream press is just translating it to something most people can more easily comprehend.
I doubt this will be useful for timekeeping, we don't really need more accurate as we have to adjust our current ones with leap seconds every so often because of changes in the Earth's rotation. But that doesn't mean there won't be other uses for it.