Slashdot Mirror
New Atomic Clock Pushes Boundaries of Accuracy
Neophytus writes "An interesting story on the BBC reports on how a new type of atomic clock is near completion that would only loose about a second in every 100 million years. Within ten years they hope to have a clock with billion year accuracy which would potentially bring advances in disease research by watching timing genes. More reports from this year's AAAS Annual meeting can be found on the BBC, and information about the event on the AAAS Annual Meeting website."
I am a biochemist/molecular biologist and I can't imagine what the author has in mind. I'm sure it was just a giddy deadline thing. He probably wrote something earlier on gene transcription timing or chronobiology and made an goofy link to this new "cutting edge research pushing back the foreskin of science..."
Accuracy on the order of 1 second in 1 billion years is about 1 part in 3x10^16. I see no way that is important to have for measurements of any observable biological process.
You can read a little more about the background of this new clock at NIST's archive of a paper in IEEE T. Instrum. Meas., for those of us who foolishly let our subscription lapse...
It would appear the chief technological development that made this clock possible was the femtosecond laser. The paper also suggests that the average error could be reduced even further than the article suggests (down to attoseconds, perhaps) if higher-order Stark and Zeeman shifts are properly treated. As for practical uses, I personally can't think of any, except to finally answer the question "Does anybody really know what time it is?" But elimination of uncertainties is laudable anyway.