Scientists have created a clock that is even
more accurate than the atomic clock.
Because scientists love to be punctual.
Anthony here for Dnews.
And a new type of atomic clock has been created.
It is called an optical lattice clock.
And while current atomic clocks are off a
second every hundred million years, optical
lattice clocks only loses a second every three
hundred million years.
Now current atomic clocks use microwaves to
make cesium atoms oscillate at almost exactly
nine billion one hundred ninety two million
six hundred thirty one thousand seven hundred
seventy times per second.
An optical lattice clock uses lasers to make
strontium atoms oscillate.
Strontium is the new cesium.
It's so hot right now.
And strontium oscillates many more times a
second.
Meaning we can measure each second more precisely.
As a rational person, you might be thinking,
"That does not make my watch or my mobile
phone any more accurate."
Valid.
But this is not about you and me getting home
in time to watch Hanibal, this is going to
affect some really serious stuff.
"Like what?"
Oh, I don't know...our ability to figure out
the entire fabric of the universe.
So think about CERN, the Large Hadron Collider.
We're launching these incredibly tiny sub-atomic
particles at each other from miles away almost
the speed of light and watching them collide
tells us new things about the nature of matter.
Those collisions last incredibly small fraction
of a second and the particles can go through
millions of transformations while it's happening.
So to make something like that happen accurately
and to make sense of it once it does, you're
going to need some really sensitive, really
synced up, time keeping instruments.
But what about something more practical?
Take GPS.
To find out where you are, multiple satellites
orbiting the earth in different directions
pinpoint you as the planet rotates under them
at a thousand miles an hour.
So they compare where they saw you and when
to get your current position.
And if those satellites are even a millisecond
off from one another, their results are gonna
differ by about 100 kilometers.
That is not super useful.
Cell phone towers, our electric grid, high-speed
data transfer over the Internet.
All this stuff requires accurate time across
multiple control devices.
Precise timekeeping is what keeps all of our
important systems running and now, we could
do it three times more accurately.
And in the future we're going to have ion
clocks.
Clocks that measure the orbit of a single
neutron and keep time to an accuracy of 10
billion years
which actually puts this a couple billion
years after the death of the sun, so GPS positioning
probably won't be as important.
It's a bit disheartening to find out so much
of our lives depends on really accurate timekeeping,
because I've sorta built mine around being
late to everything.
Constantly.
I feel cosmically outta sync now.
Are you guys punctual?
How do you feel about this?
Let me know down below and subscribe for more
Dnews.
