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

I'll alert Britannica...

[grub]

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.

Great!

[nixdorf_]

My boss will now know with 1000x the accuracy exactly how late I am. Wonderful!

Re:Accurate distance too?

[MasterC]

The length of the meter is defined by time

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html

"The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second."

So if you can measure time more accuractly then you can measure a meter more accurately.

Bad reporting

[fatphil]

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.

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.

Second Minute

[zenzic]

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"."

Awesome

[roman_mir]

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?)