New US Atomic Clock Goes Live

PaisteUser (810863) writes with news about a new, hyper-accurate atomic clock unveiled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "A new atomic clock, so accurate it will lose or gain only one second every 300 million years, was unveiled Thursday by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The NIST-F2 had been in development for about a decade and is three times more accurate than the F1, which has been in use since 1999. The institute will continue operating both clocks for now at its campus in Boulder, Colorado."

Comments

so the new clock is 3x as accurate as the old one?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Well, it's important to me to be accurate within one second every three hundred million years!

Not sure how I'd manage if my time was only accurate to one second in ONE hundred million years....

Re:Ah another seemingly benign NIST approved stand

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Is the new clock metric, or the old English units of measure?

gravitational time dialation

[volvox_voxel]

I met a guy that used to work at NIST that mentioned that their clocks are so sensitive, they can tell what floor the atomic clocks are on because of of the slightly different gravitational potential each clock experiences. I wonder what kind of resolution the can resolve. Can a very massive bolder throw off the clock a little? ..perhaps one day we will have to keep better track of the local gravitational potential well. It's possible to measure the gravitational constant with simple apparatus at home. Using two massive bodies in a torsion pendulum arrangement, you can estimate "big G" -- http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~do...

Here is an wikipedia article that mentions the phenomena with atomic clocks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

A man with one atomic clock knows what time it is.

[EmagGeek]

A man with two atomic clocks is never sure.