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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: 3, Interesting) by bziman on Thursday April 23 2015, @03:10AM
I attended a talk on this new clock by Dr. Campbell, one of the coauthors, at a steampunk convention in Denver a few weeks ago. The tech is really cool, but what was particularly wonderful was her ability to break down such a sophisticated topic into terms that a roomful of literature geeks could understand, while not hand waving away the tough parts. And as someone who studied physics, it was fantastic to see a woman with a PhD doing cutting edge research in a field so strongly dominated by men.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:55AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @12:20PM
No, it won't. Rather, the elapsed time at both places will be different.
If you're closer to the pole, measuring the distance between two meridians will give a smaller value. But not because your measuring tape gets longer near the pole, but because the distance between meridians gets shorter. It's the exact same with time at different gravitational potential: It's not that your clock is slower, it's that the time difference is smaller.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bziman on Thursday April 23 2015, @01:23PM
That's actually the whole point. This isn't for keeping time over billions of years. It is for measuring really tiny variations in timing at different locations. Among other things, it could increase accuracy of GPS by an order of magnitude. It can also be used to help measure space time curvature and gravitation effects, which is helpful for people trying to understand the nature of the universe. The tech they are using involves holding particles in a stable but unknown quantum state, which could have applications for quantum computing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:36PM
Anyone ever notice that although you see this kind of comment constantly, you never see a comment like:
?