That hunk of metal to the right is the world’s most accurate clock, say people with more knowledge of time and atomic clocks than anyone else.
Called a cesium fountain clock (aka atomic clock), this British ticker is accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second and won’t lose a second for the next 10 million years or more. I hope someone is around to wind it at that time, otherwise things could get awkward when our bioconstruct kin are zipping around with their FTL drives and arrive in Alpha Centauri a full second late.
Back on Earth, on our side of the pond, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which last reported an accuracy/uncertainty of 3 x 10-16. That’s about 100 million years between losing or gaining a second to the layman. I’ll take one for my wrist, please. [CNET]
The Joker
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 12:58 PMOK, so if the British clock is the worlds most accurate at 1 sec in 10 million years, then how is that more accurate than the NIST clock which was supposed to be 1 sec in 100 million years. Seems to me the NIST clock is 10 times more accurate.
Pat Cahill
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 3:07 PMThe post is slightly wrong. The article says that Cesium clocks _usually_ gain or lose a second ever 10 million years however this clock is much more accurate than them.
Its uncertainly is 2.3×10(-16) where the NIST clock is 3×10(-16).
BTW lower numbers are better for uncertainty measurements (you want 0 uncertainty ideally)
Rohan
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 2:50 PMI was reading an article in New Scientist about atomic clocks.
Some are so accurate that it’s impossible to truly synchronise them because of gravity’s effect on time itself.
matthew
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 3:38 PMI literally just came out of a talk this morning by Jun Ye from JILA/NIST and his optical Strontium clock has uncertainty of something like 2.7*10^-17 and they are expecting to improve that when they improve the stability of their laser.