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."

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Re:Old saying

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you think a bird in the hand is better than two in a bush, you've never been in the bush with two birds." -- Michael Parkinson (I think)