Slashdot Mirror
New Atomic Clock 1000 Times More Accurate
stevelinton writes "The UK National Physical Laboratory has a new atomic clock potentially 1000 times more accurate than current cesium clocks: to within 1 second in about 30 billion years!
This could lead quite soon to a new definition of the second, and in a while to improved resolution in GPS successor systems. More interestingly, there are theories that some of the universe's fundamental dimensionless constants may have changed by a parts in a million over the last 10 billion years or so. These clocks are so accurate that they should be able to detect these changes over a year or two."
This could lead quite soon to a new definition of the second
Now all we need is a13 year old to update the wikipedia entry.
Trolling is a art,
> to within 1 second in about 30 billion years!
And it's already almost half a second off!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Now, all we need is a device to create *more* time. In other words, slow down one's perception of time so one has more of it.
...what if someone forgets to wind it?
http://xkcd.com/386/
My boss will now know with 1000x the accuracy exactly how late I am. Wonderful!
Having seen the atomic wrist watch linked fromthe article about the guy who recently made a chess set... I only consider this technology cool if you can wear it on your wrist!
But Wikipedia is objective! OBJECTIVE!!!
I am a billionth of a second late honey!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
glows in the dark too!
oh i'm kidding, c'mon =)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I love these units I picked up at Fry's a while back and I wish my school was sensible enough to buy the wall units. Sometimes our wall clocks in the classrooms are hours off.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Great.. now I can measure measure how late the train is to an accuracy of a few attoseconds. hehe
The great thing about getting more accurate timing is that it should allow you to measure distances with the same accuracy. I think that by shining two different coloured lasers against a mirror and measuring the beats in the interference pattern of the returned beam it should be possible to measure a metre very exactly.
Anyone know if this is garbage or does more accurate time mean more accurate distance.
Simon.
already perceiving time faster, as I get older. Unlike previous generations, w/ each incarnation humans are perceptually faster [generally]; unless of course you're just stupid... which sadly most people are heh :P
I don't mean to be offensive, but is there any real point to this? How much accurate does the clock really have to be? What is the point of having a clock that is this accurate? We pour millions of dollars into this type of thing. So what? Even if we did need the accuracy (which we don't) we would never have it because the accuracy bottleneck would always be transporting the signal to wherever it's needed. Can anyone think of one good example where this clock serves any real purpose, and the old cesium one wasn't good enough?
I guess this guy will need an upgrade.
More interestingly, there are theories that some of the universe's fundamental dimensionless constants may have changed by a parts in a million over the last 10 billion years or so. These clocks are so accurate that they should be able to detect these changes over a year or two.
Exactly how long will it take to detect these changes?
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
More interestingly, there are theories that some of the universe's fundamental dimensionless constants may have changed by a parts in a million over the last 10 billion years or so. These clocks are so accurate that they should be able to detect these changes over a year or two."
Call me back when there's a portable version available.
1 second every 30 billion years? That's more than twice as long as the age of the universe. So why then would atomic clock developers need to go any further?
If those old atomic clocks were losing a second every few million years, I think we deserve refund.
of clocks: "I see no progress in this industry. These clocks are no faster than the ones they made a hundred years ago."
I understand that in some types of backbone network connections, a pair of Atomic Clocks is synchronized, then one is sent to each end of the connection.
Will it be possible to run these connections at a higher speed with more accurate clocks?
get 7 free Japanese lessons.
trapped ion frequency standards are nothing new, NIST made one years ago, the only difference is that NPL uses Strontium instead of Mercury. While it appears to be more accurate than the NIST one, trapped ion standards are not very practical to build or run for everyday use and its not a primary frequency standard, since the definition of the second is in terms of Cesium resonance, only Cesium clocks are primary frequency standards.
That's all well and good, but I'll bet it still flashes "12:00-12:00-12:00" after the power goes off.
not really. what a difference a year and a half makes. someone even mentioned 1 in 30bn in the comments
how do we know how accurate it is? The thing is, the amount of time the earth takes to go round the sun varies ever so slightly, as does the amount of time it takes the earth to rotate on it's axis. So what exactly are we measuring this new clock against in order to determine its accuracy? Surely, in order to dermine that it is accurate down to 1 second off over 30 bln years, we must be using some other more accurate measure that isn't off by 1 second over 30 bln years (say for example the amount of time it takes light to travel 3mx10^8 in a vacuum), so why don't we just continue using that more accurate measure?
Does anyone know more about this?
Sola Deo Gloria!
that i'm really older or younger than i am? and it's quite possible that the poop i just took took less time than i thought it did?
...and maybe I could get up on time.
My quartz clock made me a 1/4 second late to class the other day!
Sure everybody says, "why don't you just get up a quarter second earlier?"
Well, easier said than done!
Remember folks, turn your fine-structure constant ahead tonight before going to bed.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If these constants change over a year or two, they are not so fundamental right?
Osho
now this is a cool clock - it is mechanical and keeps time for 10,000 years ! http://www.kk.org/tools/page6-9.pdf
Slashdot's error -
It's not 1000 times more accurate, it's 3 times more accurate (than the NIST's mercury ion resonator). The figure of 1000 is what they think the technology in the future, but that's purely hypothetical.
NPL's errors -
Bombarding an ion with a blue laser in order to cool it is _in_no_way_ similar to firing a beam of light at a mirror-ball. Mirror balls do not get cooler when you fire beams of light at them. Explanations that use inappropriate analogies are as useful as wearing tie-died lab-coats in night-clubs.
If "one part in 10^18" is "nearly a thousand times more accurate than the best clocks of today", then today's best clocks must be accurate to 1 part in 10^15. Therefore this new clock, being "three times more accurate than the Americans", "3.4 parts in 10^15", cannot be the be the best clock of today. Either that or someone in NPL can't do simple maths.
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Cesium beam clocks are old tech. U.S. Naval Obeservatory (the US time standard) and the US Military use Rubidium Beam clocks. Smaller, and much more accurate.
stevelinton writes "The UK National Physical Laboratory has a new atomic clock potentially 1000 times more accurate than current cesium clocks: to within 1 second in about 30 billion years! This could lead
All it would take is a little shift in gravity or the rate the world turns... time is relative. If time were a constant the sun would flare up and die out quite quickly.
I wonder if the therorists factored this into the expanding universe theory as the earth's mass isn't constant either which affect all our observations over time.
Write this off as hype science.
How do they know it's more accurate than cesium clocks? You need to compare this new clock to something else in order to tell whether it's more accurate. But how do they know this clock is more accurate, if they don't have something which is already 100.0% accurate?
So what? Someone developed a clock that is super-accurate. But my telephone company, local TV station, and bus service still don't know anything about clock accuracy.
As seen on this blog and here, people who run time services don't even know how to implement NTP!
PI IS EXACTLY THREE!
-Prof. Frink
Too late to be known as Bush the First, he's sure to be known as Bush the Worst.
When I first started timing things we used plain 'ol rubidium clocks..and WE LIKED IT!!
According to Silvanus Thompson in his famous (and awesome!)(c1910) calculus book the word second comes from the term "second minute".
I thought that was a neat and strange word origin (if correct).
to quote him...
"When they came to require still smaller subdivisions of time, they divided each minute into 60 still smaller parts, which, in Queen Elizabeth's days, they called "second minutes" (i.e. small quantities of the second order of minuteness). Nowadays we call these small quantities of the second order of smallness "seconds"."
Wrong on all counts, I'm afraid.
.9 seconds off GMT. Whenever it drifts outside of this range, a leap second is either added or subtracted from UTC.
GMT is calculated from the mean position of the sun with regards to the 0 meridian, so it is the home of GMT, not UTC.
UTC is taken from atomic clocks, and is defined as never being more than
The reason? GMT is more useful from a practical point of view - atomic clocks are more accurate than the Earths' orbit, and so will drift off the actual calendar day.
Does this mean there will be an upgrade to the current atomic clock wristwatch?
But the real question is can MS make a download status bar that is 1000 times more precise and does not go from 2 minutes to 20, then to 4 minutes, then to 5 minutes etc. Or this invention does not affect a standard Microsoft Millisecond (which I believe is a random function?)
You can't handle the truth.
My brain just exploded in the effort it was taking trying to understand how to redefine something that only exists because of its definition... Could someone help me pick up the pieces.
I had an imaginary sig once, he said I was a loser and ran off.
I didn't have time to RTFA, but I don't think anyone would use it - it was proven time and time again, that inventors and tinkerers are so ahead of their time. :(
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Getting more and more accurate clocks is causing a very interesting (and potentially deadly) problem. Every year, the earth rotates slower and slower. I believe that currently we add a couple of leap seconds every year. Unfortunately the world has not completely standardized on when and how these leaps seconds are to be inserted. This leads to a problem where applications that require very accurate time (say airplanes) can potentially be different by a number of seconds. If airplane one has already adjusted time, airplane B has not, but the controller has, then the controller may order a plane to move to a certain position at a certain time which could cause an accident. This is not unlike the great train schedule disasters of the 1800s before time zones were standardized. There has already been one near miss that I've heard of because of this leap second problem.
In the past this wasn't a problem because timepieces had to be adjusted regularly. Obviously having accurate clocks is a good idea, so long as we can have a world standard for adjusting them.
I'm relativistically certain that when these articles and replies use the word "accurate", they really want to be saying "precise." Right?
I mean, 'what time is it?' to the Universe? What time WAS it 'when time began'? Was there a 'countdown to the beginning of time?' And in which Universal Time Zone are we? Are we on "Universal Light Matter Savings Time?" Was Heinlein correct? IS THERE Time Enough for Love?
I also wonder about the following: how can it be determined how these 'constants' change? I can imagine that the timing standard itself is dependent on these constants. How can you tell which of the two is changing?
Z
it means that this clock is as accurate as you can almost get. what is the projected maximum age of the universe? about 30 billion years right?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Not according to this page.
Also, I seem to recall that a rubidium standard is more dependent on the gas pressure, whereas Cesium is more robust to these variations (not sure, though).
Z
it means that this clock is as accurate as you can almost get. what is the projected maximum age that the universe can get to? about 30 billion years right?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
...no matter how accurate these clocks get the clocks at home, work and school will never be set to the same damn time.
Requiem
The phase centre of the receiving antennae is not the same for all directions. Even in the absense of ionosphere and timing errors, one could never be sure (unless the antenna rotation was known).
Z
Richard Branson surrenders?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Man that shit is complicated. No wonder we Americans never adopted the metric system. If I want to measure a yard, I don't need no fancy lasers. Just a yardstick!!
Can you guys imagine a beowulf cluster of these clocks?
Fortunately, any loss of life will be offset by the good of being able to determine who _really_ got First Post(tm). Ya gotta take the bad with the good.
Yes, our units are arbitrary. The first ceasium clocks were accurate enough to detect variations in our day and our year. That doesn't matter.
What we want is for our arbitrary units to be consistent. We want our clocks to do the same thing more than once.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
IANAS - so I'm asking this question because I really want to be educated. Doesn't the clock run under the same "fundamental dimensionless constants" as the rest of us? If these constants are slowing down, then won't the clock slow down with them - making detection impossible? I can understand that there are different constants - and that probably time itself isn't one of the constants being referred to... but if, for example, the clock counts the number of atomic transitions for a particular atom and those transitions are governed in part by constants that are slowing down, then how can the slowdown be detected?
..in my bedroom. It has stopped, and shows *exactly* the right time twice a day.
This "accurate" clock you describe is only exactly right every few billion years..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
According to a military friend of mine who recently rode jump-seat in a commercial 737 flight (united airlines passenger plane), they do land on auto-pilot.
:-).
My friend actually requested of them to manually land the plane instead of using auto-pilot to land, and they did, it was quite a bit rougher than a "normal" (autopilot) landing
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
The fundamental enabler for using an optical transition as a time stand is a device called the Femtosecond comb laser. This is buried way down in the article. The reason we currently use the cesium transition is that it was the best precise atomic transition we know about that ws slow enough to count using the available counting technology. the oscillation speed is near 10Ghz. We can now count this directly rather than through an elaborate divider chain, which is why the accuracy has improved by five orders of magnitude over the past forty years. Now, we can use the femtosecond comb as a pahse-locked divider of extreme precision. THis lets us "count" optical transitions by mode-locking a pulsed lasser to the optical reference. This in turn permit us to use a mercury transition or a strontiou transition that is 3 orders of magnigude faster than the cesium transition. The difference between the mercury transitins and the strontium transition (a factor of three) is utterly trivial by comparison to the factor of 1000 gain provided by the femtosecond comb.
If not, I don't want to hear about it.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Um...so are they claiming that this clock has somehow been rendered miraculously exempt from those very same physical constant deviations that it is trying to measure? A dimensionless physical constant applies to the *whole* freakin' universe, including the clock. The only result from the clock would be "same as it ever was...same as it ever was..."
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
You have to find two measurements that you can compare which will be affected in different ways by the changing constants. I'm not sure of the details but I imagine you end up comparing the ratios of the fundamental frequencies of two different atomic transitions or something like that. If one beats 2.34567891011 times to each beat of the other now and 2.34567891012 times to each beat next year, and all sources of error have been eliminated then you have discovered something.
Isn't that where they use microscopes to examine belly-button lint?
does it have a snooze button?
...you'll have to change the definition of constant.
No, GMT is the same as UTC.
Xenu loves you!
I see your point -- does it become circular logic when the constant you are using to measure the quality of your measurement is actually a variable introducing error into your results? Then, is the variation really from that "constant", or from the measuring equipment?
Well, I don't know (I IsNot physicist) but there may be a way to prove that some result isn't affected significantly enough by the rate of error in the "constant." Of course, to do that, you have to assume that your other constants aren't also changing... Maybe the rate of decay isn't constant either because of an as-yet undiscovered property of matter.
My own (non-canonical) theory is that there are no constants. Our short lifetimes cause us to see constants where there are only imperceptibly changing variables. Also, we are confined to making all of our measurements from a single-point in space. For all we know, in some sufficiently distant location, all of the "constants" have a different value or even vary wildly.
This has been bugging me for years. There's this spurious "atomic clocks are accurate to 1 second within a million years" thing - so how the hell to you measure it? And if you've got a more accurate way of measuring time, why not just use *that* as the clock.
I know there's an answer, please enlighten.
Cheers,
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
This is going to make competition between cell-phone companies really fierce! "We bill you by the pico-second, while our competitors bill you by a full microsecond. Do you really want that?"
That's nice, but will it fit on my wrist?
I sincerely hope this is a joke.
Only problem is the non-homogeneity of the index of refraction of air. I don't think you'll be able to get attometers from that.
Like anyone can even register a segement of time that short in their mind
Wont you need a something with greater accuracy than the subject to be able to measure accuracy in time? ex: use of atomic clock to measure accuracy of a normal clock etc.. And how do one measure accuracy of an atomic clock.. maybe that was said in the article but im so darn busy :)
The intent of the post doesn't matter.
;-)
That was hilarious, I hope it gets 5 points for Funny!
BTW, he has indirectly refuted global warming.
However, we can use the earth's average temperature to calibrate our instruments.
I hate to be a complainer but if it is that accurate then would it not be more impacted by the strength of the local gravitational field? It the gravity
is weaker in Fort Collins as compared to Fort Walton Beach and there was a clock in each then they would not keep in sync. With older less accurate clocks, perhaps it does not matter??? Maybe that would be a plus? Testing General Relativity? I don't know.
Imagine a beowulf clusters of those! We could get even more accurate measurements if we'd networked them!
a near miss means they missed when they were near. this is obviously more dangerous than missing when they are far. the phrase "nearly missed" is quite a bit different than "near miss," doncha think, tard?
If those old atomic clocks were losing a second every few million years, I think we deserve refund.
Turn in your atomic clock at the Yucca Mountain repository for the nickel refund. This has been a public service announcement. If there had been a real announcement, you would have been instructed to dial 10-10-220-411 on your IM dial.
No portability, ease of use,
http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/atomic-bill/ind
GPS needs 10E18 Hz clocks?
i find that weird. I would say that Intel , AMD and IBM are the winners here, cause they can now more accurately measure GHz frequencies of their latest CPU models.
To make GPS more accurate, one needs to have more accurate positions and distances of the various GPS satelites. Measuring a large distance more accurately can however be improved with higher precision clocks. Then again disturbances in the space/time continuum always will spoil things.
Robert
The official measures of time are the earth's rotation and the earth's trip around the sun. Atomic clocks can't seem to match this. They are off by a full second some years.
So I ask you, how can you tell how accurate a clock is when there is not a more accurate clock to measure against? and 2, how can you claim a clock is accurate when it can't even keep time compared to the official time keeping method of the earth?
Coding Blog
If some clock is held to be the standard, how can they say that its off by so many seconds every so many thousand years? By what standard is the standard held to?
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
Dont reply to this guy he will just spam your email. If you want a gmail invite reply to ME with your email and send $5 for labor.
"...[accurate] to within 1 second in about 30 billion years!"
My question is, how do they know? I mean, seems like in order to make a statement like this, you would have to have something even more accurate to compare it to. Say you want to compare a pendulum clock with a wristwatch, for example. You can start them at the same instant, and after a while they will diverge and each report a different time of day. When that happens, how do you really know which is more accurate?
"Nuclear, Nuclear." I want a fusion powered watch, of course then I may have sanctions placed against me by the U.N. Look out don't make the U.N. mad or as Hans Blix says, "We will become angry and write you a strongly worded letter." (Seacrest, Out.)
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING!
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
In other news, someone has developed the internal combustion engine!
or else!
No, not the old joke.
Suppose you have a set of say, 30 or so clocks, all in tight communication with one another. They all keep the time happily, checking every once in a while what the other clocks think about things.
If one of them gets out of range, it resets itself to match the others.
How accurate would that be?
sigs, as if you care.
Great! This means we can start combing Ebay for deals on all the atomic clocks that just became obsolete.
Thanks for the enlightenment, I must have misread in the past.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
What about pulsars? They are rapidly spinning neutron stars whose rotational speed is very stable and predictable. They make the Earth look like a rusty pocket watch.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
We can read :
"since the first leap second in 1972, all leap seconds have been positive and there were 22 leap seconds in the 27 years to January, 1999."
Which means after running a clock, according to _our_ standards, for 365 days, we need to manually adjust it and add 1 second. This then looks like _our_ own time standard and its clocks are ticking on a too slow rate. From which i conclude that, compared to Paris time standards, our world and planet earth is "gearing" up in speed. Indeed, i feel as if i'm loosing time every day :)
The conclusion i get from this, is that our natural surroundings are ticking faster, compared to our own standards of time.
Now there's two solutions to this problem :
1. fix our own standards of time, i.e. nature must be correct.
2. our standard of time is correct, we only need to force nature to be on time. This would be absurd however.
Now as to the leap seconds. I run several computers here, and one of them is running as my local ntpd server, which is synced to a GPS time system :
The other computers however only run the ntpdate client every morning at 06:00h. To my surprise i see from the loggings that these computers need between 8 to 10 positive leaps seconds in 24 hours time. Thats quite a difference compared to the 1 positive leap second per Year according the Paris time standards.What i make of this , is that either someone has been fiddling with our .GPS. clocks, or our Paris time standards are a total joke. I tend to believe the first. What does this mean? That instead of loosing 5.9 hours in a galaxy cycle of 26000 years, we actually lost 3.1 years during this galaxy cycle of 26000 years.
"Loosing" here means, positive time manually added to our own Paris clock standard.
Galaxy Cycle :
"The Moon has a cycle around the Earth, the Earth has a cycle around the Sun, the Solar System has a cycle in the Milky Way," Ms Blake says. "That [the galaxy cycle] takes 26,000 years, and this particular calendar is coming to the end of that cycle. "That long cycle ends in 2012 - it's the end of a cycle, the end of a time. A new era is starting for the solar system."
news.bbc.co.uk
Robert
I also thought it was more than coincidence a second is about the heartbeat of physcially fit adult. (70 beats a minute is considered below average fitness.)
I know I'm being naive about this, but I'm curious. When this value was calculated, did anyone suggest that the meter correspond to 1/300,000,000 lightsecond exactly? Light-speed calculations would be easier, and it would have a more Metric "feel" to it.
Those who needed this precision would notice the difference between this and defining the meter the way it was decided on, of course. But didn't they have to account for a new definition anyway?
There is a whole branch of geophysical meteorology based on GPS jitter now. Its considered an efficent way to globally observe changes in the ionsphere, atmospheric moisture. etc. "One scientist's noise is anothers signal" as the aphorism goes.
Q: Does this new Strontium time standard attempt to tune a later between a pair of lines, or onto a single line?
Q: What is the approx. wave length of the laser that is being used?
Q: Given a well tuned / stable frequency laser, how to they count with it? A Cs maser operates in the GHz range, so one does not need ultra exotic circuits to count the waves. You (and the story) seem to imply that a optical laser is being used. A laser operates at a much higher frequency than a maser. How to they count with a laser?
Hmm, maybe it will help prove/disprove this:
"Faster than the speed of light: the story of a scientific speculation" by Joao Magueijo ( amazon ).
I read this book a few months ago, it is absolutely fascinating (if you're into the "popular science" genre). Basically, IIRC, the guy reckons that c (speed of light in a vacuum) is not really constant (along with a whole host of other "constants"), but depends on the size of the universe or something to that effect. From our current perspective it changes so little as to be undetectable, but perhaps with this new gadget that will change?
No, GMT is the same as UTC. You're thinking of UT1.
Xenu loves you!
...I'll be late for work anyway.
I'll have to remember this, the next time I tell someone "I'll be back in a second." ;P
"Remember, no matter where you go, there you are." -- Dr. Buckaroo Bonzai, PhD