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."

Comments

Re:Why do this?

[Misanthropy]

I was thinking the same thing until I actually read the article.

An answer from the article that affects everyone and not just super geek physicists:

Navigation on earth - based on a cluster of orbiting satellites - is limited by the accuracy of the atomic clock on each satellite. A series of calculations can get millimetre accuracy on the position of a stationary object, but for moving objects like cars and planes the accuracy is no better than a few metres. Only by making faster measurements can this accuracy be improved, something enabled by a more accurate definition of the second.
...
"That is why GPS is not yet good enough to land a passenger aircraft on its own," Prof Gill says.


Pretty cool stuff.