NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
A good clock for a few billion years
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2019 May 5, 09:03 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2019 May 5, 09:03 -0700
The world's most precise clock sits on a table in Jun Ye’s lab in Boulder, Colorado. A tangle of electronics, fiber-optic cables, and laser beams, the clock is still a prototype, so no one actually uses it to tell time. Ye, a physicist at the research institute JILA, and his team have demonstrated that the clock can produce a second with precision in the parts per quintillion—that’s 10¹⁹, some hundred billion times more precise than a quartz wristwatch. Put another way, if the clock had started ticking at the Big Bang, by today it would have lost or gained no more than a second. It’s not just the most precise clock in the world—it’s the most precise device in the world.
Frank Reed
