Slashdot Mirror
Nist: New Optical Clock More Accurate Than Cesium
LordPhatal writes "NIST researchers have demonstrated a new kind of atomic clock that has the potential to be up to 1,000 times more accurate than today's best clock. The new clock is based on an energy transition in a single trapped mercury ion.
Damn, now it's gonna be even harder to pass off my being late.
GOD, those interuption adds are HUGE!!!
Duh! When this clock breaks the mercury will go everywhere! They already went through this phase with thermometers.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
what exactly are they basing time on? what exactly is a second? and how is it that we determine its length?
"you sonofabitch i didn't know!"
...nursery rhyme to replace Hickory Dickory Dock:
Flappity floppity flip,
A mouse on a moebius strip,
The strip revolved,
The mouse dissolved,
In a chronodimensional skip!
:)
The NIST labs out in Boulder, CO is a fabulous place to go and visit if you ever find yourself in town, or in Denver. They will gladly take you on a tour, and show you all sorts of interesting toys that they have. Probably the best part of the tour for me was the liquid hydrogen. Even better was touching it. Yes I did, yes I still have all my digits. Basically, it is exactly the same concept as fire; move your hand thru it very quickly. In this case, touch it quickly and retract. The tour guide also shrank a balloon completely down, as we all watched, as it slowly got bigger when he took it back out. And of course on the tour, was getting to see the atomic clock. (On the other side of a window of course.) Check it out!
And if you are in Boulder, and enjoy tea, make sure to take a tour of the Celestial Seasonings Tea Plant. If you have sinus problems, their Peppermint room will take care it, pronto.
I've always wondered just how they determine how reliable a clock is.
Afterall, can't measure meters without a meterstick. Do they simply take a N Cesium clocks and average out their time to determine how close a single Mercury based clock sticks to it? Or did I miss the memo where we could acurrately time trillionths of a second?
Rod Taylor
well, ONE single ion can only go SOMEwhere, not EVERYwhere, unless they know its momentum very precisely.
what ads?
...now more accurate than time itself. In a press release Time said that with advent of the new clock, it was no longer required, and was considering retiring to Whyoming for some well deserved self-off. When asked how it would occupy itself, Time suggested it might take up Fly fishing. Time said the flies reminded it of Fruit Flies, whose affinity for Bannanas was a constant source of amusement for Time over the years.
What were you expecting?
This is much funnier than its parent! Too bad you didn't log in, AC.
YAAMP (Yet Another AnthroMorphic Projection)
From what I remember from my college Physics/Relativity course [info gathered when I wasn't using the class as purely nap-time]: "time is relative". Isn't building a "perfect clock" impossible to do on Earth? In order for it to be accurate, wouldn't you have to create it somewhere in deep-space (ie. no large mass ANYWHERE affecting it) and somewhere where it would have absolutely NO movement (ie. not revolving around a star, not revolving around [the center of] a galaxy, not approaching anything that might be out there between the galaxies, etc...)?
Just curious.
Karma: NaN
One advantage of the new clock is that it ticks much faster. Today?s international time and frequency standards, such as NIST-F1, measure an atomic resonance of about 9 billion cycles per second. By contrast, the new NIST device monitors an optical frequency more than 100,000 times higher or about 1 quadrillion (US) cycles per second.
A 9 GHz oscillation can be hooked up directly to electronic circuits, counters, PLLs, etc. My first question when I read this article was, how the heck do you synchronize anything else to a "frequency" that's in the optical / ultraviolet range? I found some more information on this page and this one, so I guess that's how this new clock works.
A meter is defined by the General Conference on Weights and Measures to be the distance light travels in a vacuum in a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The 1889 definition of the meter was based on an international prototype of platinum-iridium.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
time to setup an ntp server on one of these things ;)
according to the National Institute of Standarts and Technology.
so we know it by definition, which is pretty accurate. it has to be, our definition of a meter depends on it.
but you wouldn't believe how a kilogram is defined...
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
That was one of the major points of relativity. There's no true state of rest either, incidentally. Flow of time and rates of motion are both relative. You can say two objects are stationary relative to each other, but that doesn't mean they both aren't moving. Time works similarly, since the difference in the rate of time flow on two objects is dependent on their relative velocities.
I always thought a second was saying "one one-thousand" or "one Mississippi" (gotta say it quick) or "One potato". at least thats how it was back when I played 2-hand touch football. You could only blitz when you counted to five or ten using one of the above accepted methods of timing a second. But for real now, why do we need to get that much better than a bloody cesium clock? Does somebody REALLY care whether it was 9.433324545 seconds or 9.433324549 seconds? Maybe scientists? Physicists? Psychotic deranged people who wear aluminum foil body suits and 14 swatches? Enlighten me people...
Lousy facepalm.