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Man-Made Atomic Clocks the Best In the Universe
An anonymous reader writes "The widespread belief by astrophysicists that pulsars and white dwarfs are the best clocks in the universe is wrong, say two Australian physicists. John Hartnett and Andre Luiten from the University of Western Australia have recently shown that man-made terrestrial atomic clocks take the crown, contrary to numerous claims in astrophysical literature that the natural timing provided by pulsars and white dwarfs is the most precise. The preprint of their paper, available on the arXiv, shows that terrestrial clocks exceed the accuracy and stability of the astrophysical 'clocks' by all sensible measures, in some cases by several orders of magnitude."
in dutch: hoogmoed komt voor de val.....
Religion is something man made, mostly based on something big that happened.... And at the moment they are mostly busy with child abuses, or blowing them selves up...
But saying that man made the best in the universe, without ever having left our solar system is a little bit naive...
Headline is awfully closed-minded of us to proclaim. I'm sure an alien race has a clock far, far better than our primitive cesium-transition clocks.
Considering that we're using atomic clocks to detect the rate of _spin_ _down_ of several neutron stars (and of course, starquakes and glitches), claiming that neutron stars are somehow superior is just stupid.
The summary seems to use precision and accuracy interchangeably, they are in fact quite different.
Maybe aliens do (i'm half joking)
Ditto. I thought it was very egotistical of us to believe that in the entire universe, our way is best.
There are 9 × 10^21 (9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the observable universe. Many of the stars themselves are unobservable, but we can see them because they are part of a galaxy that is obviously far away, and appears as a faint dot in our sky. That's only in the 46 billion light years from our lonely rock in the cosmos that we can observe.
The odds that there isn't another populated planet (or a few hundred thousand of them) is pretty slim. Some are likely to be as advanced as us. The possibility is there that some are more advanced. Or worse, they were more advanced but have long since died off, but their "perfect" clocks still exist and are still running.
But hey, more power to 'em. If they want to declare us the winners, I won't argue. We're the best. Yea! Humans!
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
To which Science interjects and says: See this is why you and I aren't friends anymore. You keep expecting me to pick sides and I won't, it's not my argument. But I will say that your much heralded Pink Unicorn Proof stinks as a proof for your own beliefs, because it is at best a caricature, and at worst an attempt to prove a generalised theorem by 'proving' a singular instance: i.e. "Everybody knows that Invisible Pink Unicorns don't exist therefore nothing exists that we cannot see" My son mathematics and my dad Logic would like a word with you....