from the Big-ball-of-wibbly-wobbly...time-y-wimey...stuff dept.
Timekeeping theory combines quantum clocks and Einstein's relativity:
A phenomenon of quantum mechanics known as superposition can impact timekeeping in high-precision clocks, according to a theoretical study from Dartmouth College, Saint Anselm College and Santa Clara University.
Research describing the effect shows that superposition—the ability of an atom to exist in more than one state at the same time—leads to a correction in atomic clocks known as "quantum time dilation."
The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, takes into account quantum effects beyond Albert Einstein's theory of relativity to make a new prediction about the nature of time.
"Whenever we have developed better clocks, we've learned something new about the world," said Alexander Smith, an assistant professor of physics at Saint Anselm College and adjunct assistant professor at Dartmouth College, who led the research as a junior fellow in Dartmouth's Society of Fellows. "Quantum time dilation is a consequence of both quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity, and thus offers a new possibility to test fundamental physics at their intersection."
Journal Reference:
Alexander R. H. Smith, Mehdi Ahmadi. Quantum clocks observe classical and quantum time dilation [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18264-4)
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday October 26 2020, @12:17AM (2 children)
Any continuum can encode infinite amount of information.
Proof: π-filesystem based on number π was already proven to exist, and there are infinitely many such filesystems, all of them forming a continuum.
All continua can be mapped on each other at will.
The time (especially those extremely small periods) observably cannot encode infinite amount of information, therefore time is not a continuum.
If time is not a continuum, then using continuum based mathematical apparatus for describing time (like physicists do) is...
madnessinadequate.So, I observe a vulnerability here, for The Universe runs on a different machine than we are taught.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 26 2020, @02:35AM
5.39 × 10−44s [wikipedia.org] is quite a small tick unit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by nostyle on Monday October 26 2020, @03:51AM
I fail to understand how the march of time is an encoding problem.
Still the question of whether time (and/or space) is discontinuous is (last I checked) an open question. The "chronon" was initially proposed nearly a hundred years ago, and lots of brilliant fellows have considered the question. It would be nice if someone could make meaningful progress on it.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday October 26 2020, @01:33AM (2 children)
Does it mean that they believe time is multi-dimensional?
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @02:30AM (1 child)
It is [2enp.com]
(Score: 2) by Zinnia Zirconium on Monday October 26 2020, @03:56AM
Haha! Yup it's a timecube. Though I never get past timesquare. I'm living Sunday and Monday cotemporally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @03:04AM (2 children)
It would be nice if they included in their paper some statement on a calculation of the magnitude of the effect and relate it to the current state of the art atomic clocks. All I found were statements like "maybe they can detect it with rubidium clocks, maybe they can detect it with electron procession experiments . . ." blah blah blah. Maybe I overlooked it because I only scanned the paper two or three times (specifically looking for this kind of information), but it seemed to me to be a not very useful theoretical paper (I know, that is often a redundant statement)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 26 2020, @04:58AM
I hope the 2-3 times were relativistic quantum times, otherwise it's just wasted classical time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 26 2020, @10:49AM
You mean, like in Fig. 2?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 26 2020, @11:51AM
Looking at their formula (25), the quantum correction for time dilation, something strikes me as odd:
If the superposition causes the time dilation, I'd naively expect that the effect is the larger, the more different the momenta of the two terms are. The numerator supports this, but the denominator has an exponential term that absolutely dominates for large differences, making the correction go to zero when the difference goes to infinity.
Moreover, that exponential term contains the width of the wave packet. For a superposition effect, I'd expect the effect to be seen more clearly the more narrow the packets are (so that the overlap between both branches is minimized). But again, in the limit of small width, the exponential term dominates, and thus correction goes to zero exponentially. Indeed, the correction is maximized when the width goes to infinity (which makes the two terms of the superposition effectively indistinguishable).
In addition, it is somewhat surprising that the angle phi (the relative phase between the two terms of the superposition) enters at all; indeed, when phi=pi/2, the correction vanishes completely.
All this together makes me suspect that this is not so much a superposition effect as an interference effect (of course interference requires superposition, but not the other way round).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 26 2020, @04:11PM
i dont understand. any infinite amount of time passes between reading this and this or between blinking your eyes.
however we/humans are not registering this and sofar have found not material to build a clock that is part of our observed time flow AND this other infinite time inbetween ...
the conclusion can mearly be that it is irrelevant but unproofable.
better stick to stuff we can measure, eh?
the hunt thus is of a material science type mostly?
maybe, but not holding my breath here, some material is of "fuzzy" type in regards to "time" just like uranium was a material or stepping stone to "here but not here in space" or solidity?