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New Atomic Clock Reaches the Boundaries of Timekeeping
SonicSpike sends an article from NPR about a high-tech clock being built at the University of Colorado Boulder. It's more precise than any clock before, able to keep perfect time for five billion years. "At the heart of this new clock is the element strontium. Inside a small chamber, the strontium atoms are suspended in a lattice of crisscrossing laser beams. Researchers then give them a little ping, like ringing a bell. The strontium vibrates at an incredibly fast frequency. It's a natural atomic metronome ticking out teeny, teeny fractions of a second." But this precision leads to a problem: the relativistic differences between keeping the clock on the floor versus hanging it on the wall now introduce more significant fluctuations than the clock itself. "Tiny shifts in the earth's crust can throw it off, even when it's sitting still. Even if two of them are synchronized, their different rates of ticking mean they will soon be out of synch. They will never agree. The world's current time is coordinated between atomic clocks all over the planet. But that can't happen with the new one."
that was my first thought -- these things, if they could be manufactured to be affordable, would be great for relative positioning -- although I was thinking seismometers, not GPS. If you had a network of them, you could instantly (well,at the speed of light) map out any changes in their positioning.
Which reminds me; as my head is moving faster than my feet relative to the centre of the earth, they age at different rates. Same principle at work here. But it means I should spend more time standing on my head :)
Another old saying I like, from sailors:
When going to sea, take one clock or three, but never two.
(Knowing the time was essential for navigation, to figure out longitude, back in the days before GPS navigation.)
Not warranted for war, plagues, pestilence, or the power going out for an extended period.
New Atomic Clock Reaches the Boundaries of Timekeeping
On Earth, maybe. It's not a theoretical limit - the article itself points out that you can put the clocks in space.
Ye suspects the only way we will be able to keep time in the future is to send these new clocks into space. Far from the earth's surface, the clocks would be better able to stay in synch, and perhaps our unified sense of time could be preserved.
And the man with a broken watch can still say the right time twice a day.
Life is not for the lazy.
Because it would be meaningless to "compensate" for the time difference between clocks moving and accelerating differently. Time literally moves at different rates in different reference frames. The clocks are correct; the problem is that the concept of similtaneity is fundamentally flawed.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
I find immense beauty in the fact that they set out to make as perfect a tracker of time they could. And end up creating an improved gravity detector when they ran into a wall. :) tell me again, that basic science doesn't deserve funds.