When do they start making watches?
And handing them out to public transport drivers
Physicists fire up strontium atomic clock
US physicists are rather pleased with themselves having perfected a clock "so accurate it will neither gain nor lose even a second in more than 200 million years", Reuters reports. The atomic timepiece, developed in the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) - a collaboration between US Commerce Department's …
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Monday 18th February 2008 15:20 GMT Julian Cook
so what happens if i pull out the plug
and have they taken into account the cost of the power bill, what with a 15% rise this year by the time 200 million years has passed it would take the entire GDP of the earth just to pay the bill. Given that all the tree huggers belive that the earth will be long gone before this i really don't see the need for a clock.
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Monday 18th February 2008 15:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
+/- 1s/200 milion years ...@ 0m
If Einstein is right, gravitic field has effect to observed passage of time and higher you are in the field, more prominent the effect is.
So, putting a clock this accurate into a lift in some high-rise building could compleatly ruin its accuracy against a clock staying stationary?
Some timepiece.
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Monday 18th February 2008 15:23 GMT Richard Kay
Leap seconds
Because atomic clocks measure time more accurately than the slowing-down earth they have to introduce leap seconds occasionally to keep earth time in sync with atomic time, instead of having to adjust atomic time to the less reliable planetary time. Last occasion there was a leap second I was able to observe the effect of having 61 seconds in the final minute of the day in my server's NTP (network time protocol) synchronisation logs. My watch also automatically synchronises to atomic time, (via a radio signal from Rugby), so there is no need to put an atomic timer directly into a wrist watch.
Paris because Paris wanted the meridian but Greenwich got it.
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Monday 18th February 2008 15:51 GMT Eddy Ito
BFD
What's the big f-ing deal? They're still going to reset the damn thing twice a year so the hoi polloi can fool themselves into getting up an hour earlier in the summer. After all, resetting the time the alarm goes off is far too difficult, we should reset every damn clock in the our tiny little worlds. All of it for what? To "save daylight" when the damn sun is up before 4 am and doesn't go down until after 10 pm. It's akin to saving snowflakes in a bloody blizzard! Save daylight my ass, some pol is making money off this racket some how.
Can I get a flaming black helicopter icon please?
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Monday 18th February 2008 17:06 GMT John Savard
Length Instead of Time
At one time, the second was defined in terms of Cesium, because it was easy to put a microwave signal into electronics for telling time, while the light wavelength of Krypton was used to define the metre.
They decided to drop Krypton, and define the speed of light to get the length standard.
If they do switch to Strontium as the new standard, because a light wavelength lends itself to interferometry, clearly they should switch to defining the metre in terms of Strontium, and letting the second fall out of being the time it takes for light to travel so many of those metres
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Monday 18th February 2008 17:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Not that type of clock!
I assume all the people worrying about why they need such accuracy when there are leap seconds, daylight savings time etc are joking?
This isnt a clock it is a "Clock Source" i.e. it provides timing information, it is not like a wrist watch or a wall clock (although it could great accuracy in any device built along those lines which takes its input from this clock source).
The global telecomms networks and other applications require accurate "timing" to synchronise the signals being passed from one node to the next.
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Monday 18th February 2008 23:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
re: +/- 1s/200 milion years ...@ 0m
...They've already done this experiment with two Cesium clocks. The further away you are from the massive object (in this case the Earth), the faster the clocks tick. They put a Cesium clock aboard a airliner, flew it around a while and compared it with a clock left on Earth... And found a difference, in line with what was predicted by relativity. Which also illustrates the need for high-accuracy clocks when investigating fundamental physics. I just wonder how they even synchronize these. They'd almost have to use the exact same length of wire going to both clocks when they send the electronic signal to 'reset'...
...as far as measuring the ticking of the universe, I suppose you could say that the clock speed of the universe is the speed of light. The universe is a computer, or running on one? (see Jack Chalker's "Well World" series)
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Tuesday 19th February 2008 00:22 GMT Charles Manning
@Eddy - Cure for daylight savings
If people want to get up an hour earlier isn't it just easier to move to a city that is 15 degrees East at the start of summer, then move back at the end of summer? You can leave your summer clothes at the 15 deg E place and the woolies at the winter residence.
That's much easier than trying to remember setting the clock forwards or backwards.
[PH coz she probably has a few houses].
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
