Keeping Time with a Mercury Atom

Roland Piquepaille writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced that a new experimental atomic clock based on a single mercury atom is now at least five times more precise than NIST-F1, the U.S. standard clock. This mercury atomic clock 'would neither gain nor lose a second in about 400 million years' while it would take 'only' 70 million years to NIST-F1, based on a 'fountain' of cesium atoms, to gain or lose a second. But even if this new kind of optical atomic clock is more accurate than cesium microwave clocks, it will take a while before such a design can be accepted as an international standard. A ZDNet summary contains pictures and more details about the world's most precise clock."

Comments

unfortunately

[legallyillegal]

syncing to time.singlemercuryatom.nist.gov doesn't work yet.

Re:unfortunately

[uglydog]

maybe it's been /.ed?

Re:unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're going to be addressing individual mercury atoms, I don't think switching to IPv6 is good enough...

Re:400 million years

[gardyloo]

Pfft. You'll regret saying that when the readers of the future see the article's 3.56*10^12th dupe.

Great news for D-Link

[GreggBz]

Great news for those mission critical D-Link routers!

Only problem is...

[mrjb]

They're treating time as if it were something absolute.

Re:Only problem is...

[Slithe]

> Would you like me to give you a lecture about distance in Minkowskian geometry? Or perhaps a quick introduction to Riemann manifolds?

Yes, please. I love free lectures!

The only problem arises...

[viking2000]

...from the Heisenberg uncertainly principle:

The more precisely
the MOMENTUM is determined,
the less precisely
the POSITION is known

So this clock is unfortunately missing. And when it is found, it is not so accurate anymore.

I'm registering domain names now

[shidarin'ou]

400 million years in the future, my descendents will profit unthinkable amounts from their ownership of y400002k.com

Just in case the religious right get a further hold on our country in the future, I've also registered jesuswillreturn400002k.com and (hedging my bets) spaghettimonsterwillreturn400002k.com

but we all know that by that time, humanity will simply be slaves to the powerfully accurate mercury clock.

So, I for one welcome our new mercury atom overlords, and remind them that mercyatomoverlords.com can be had for the steal of 6.7 billion dollars, should cover the cost of registering the domain up to that point.

but will it

[p51d007]

Fit on my wrist??????????

wristwatch

[elmartinos]

Can't wait to have a wristwatch with this. My atomic wristwatch is a bit too bulky.

Re:400 million years

[Das Modell]

It's easy to make impressive statements like that when you know nobody will be around to prove you wrong!

This man begs to differ.

Re:How much accuracy do you need?

[UnknowingFool]

So... at what point do you say that a clock is accurate enough?

When you can snipe anybody at will on eBay.