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Most Precise Atomic Clock Ever Built Will Only Lose a Second Every 30 Billion Years

https://gizmodo.com/newly-precise-atomic-clock-will-only-lose-a-second-ever-1851575826

The device, which traps thousands of atoms to keep time, is "pushing the boundaries of what's possible with timekeeping." The device traps thousands of atoms to keep time, and is "pushing the boundaries of what's possible with timekeeping."

Most Precise Atomic Clock Ever Built Will Only Lose a Second Every 30 Billion Years

27 comments

themeatbridge

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Yeah, but in 1.8 trillion years, you're going to be a minute late for everything.

lauha

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Imagine being 15 minutes late to the heat death of the universe. Unacceptable.

Vigge93

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Damn right, you'd miss the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster drink before the dinner. Not ok.

Cosmos7349

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I mean but this should save me some hassle from my current clock that I need to adjust every 10 billion years.

thefartographer

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The Germans will be furious

kambusha

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*the Swiss

iAvicenna

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Oh shit I missed the sun explosion!

Damage

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Just stick a post-it with: "TODO 01/01/30000002024: set one second forward"

anton

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... or one second back, that's the problem.

pelletbucket

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prove it

jeffw

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Remindme! 30 billion years

Just give me a little bit of time, I got this. You’re gonna see!

scutiger

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Surely in 30 billion years nothing could possibly happen to the supercooled strontium to throw that off, right?

nokturne213

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Does it still need a groundhog to tell it when spring is?

fredrik

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Yes, of course.

RizzRustbolt

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But the groundhog will be made out of gallium arsenide.

AmidFuror

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Hopefully they will improve with the next model.

Mouselemming

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Just checking... Was anyone on the team named Igor?

solrize

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What do you set it to?

corroded

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In clocks like this, the "set time" is often irrelevant. It's more important to know exactly how much time has passed since the last time the clock was "checked." If you're running a radio transmitter at 6ghz, that's 6 billion cycles per second. If you synch your transmitter to your clock once per second, it had better be accurate to the billionth of a second.

xenoclast

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This. Clocks like this are for measuring duration in a scientific context.

MonkderDritte

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Or tech, like GPS.

xenoclast

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Oh duh, yeah. The most obvious example.

anton

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The other atomic clocks that are averaged to give us our ground truth for time.

Sparkega

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But does this account for our days getting longer?

Edit: /s

xthexder

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Standard seconds are defined based on measurable properties of a cesium atom. The historical definition of 1/86400th of a day doesn't work for science if the duration is inconsistent.

For example the statement:

Earth's Days Are Getting 2 seconds Longer Every 100,000 Years

becomes self-referencing and loses all meaning without some other reference point.

RizzRustbolt

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"I suppose".

Boom, now it's a scientific unit.

todd_bonzalez

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This is time relative to earth, and the actual passage of time in the universe that we aim to measure doesn't care about the Earth's rotation.