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

Re:Only problem is...

[Umbral Blot]

Relativity doesn't make clocks less useful, in fact it makes them more useful (because you can use them to figure out how fast you are going as well). And assuming that the clock remains under constant acceleration there is no reason to believe that relativity would make it less accurate.

Re:400 million years

[evilviper]

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

Complete nonsense. This isn't a "prediction", it's a mathematical number/time. Like any other number/time, you can easily convert it into shorter time-frames.

1 sec in 400 million years is ==
    1/2 sec in 200 million years
    1/4 sec in 100 million years
    1/8 sec in 50 million years
    etc.

That means it is accurate to 0.000000025ths of a second in 10 years... A more partical time-frame, which can be tested fairly easily.

Re:Only problem is...

[Lumpy]

That an it will help prove my Theory that there is a black hole in time here on the planet earth. AS we age we accelerate towards the black hole and therefore experience time distortion. Think about it. As a child summer took F-O-R-E-V-E-R. As a Teen it took about what felt like the right amount of time. As a Young Adult in college it seems like summer was shorter than normal. A person in their 40's summer feels like about 3 weeks and other effects of time distortion take effect.... Week-ends feel like they last ony a single day. And the inconsistancies also start showing as the time gravitional waves pass by you. A work week seems like it took a day to pass while a co-worker next to you in the same age bracket feels like it took much longer.

As you get near your 80's the gravity of the black hole starts tugging not only at your time harder by at you in physical ways. Your skin starts sagging, you break bones easier because of the greater gravity in the physical dimensions.. How many people have heard old people complain it's hard to walk?? Huh! Observable proof!

Mercury clocks would help here. We attach one to every newborn for a decade and then look at the time distortion as it happens so we can figure out how to defeat this terror.