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

Comments

• themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • lauha@lemmy.one ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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    • Vigge93@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • Cosmos7349@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • thefartographer@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The Germans will be furious

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    • kambusha@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      *the Swiss

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  • iAvicenna@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Oh shit I missed the sun explosion!

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• Damage@feddit.it ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    … or one second back, that’s the problem.

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• pelletbucket@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  prove it

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  • jeffw@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Remind me! 30 billion years

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

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• scutiger@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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• nokturne213@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • fredrik@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, of course.

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    • RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      But the groundhog will be made out of gallium arsenide.

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• AmidFuror@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Hopefully they will improve with the next model.

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• Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Just checking… Was anyone on the team named Igor?

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• Sparkega@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  But does this account for our days getting longer?

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  • xthexder@l.sw0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      “I suppose”.

      Boom, now it’s a scientific unit.

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  • todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• solrize@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What do you set it to?

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  • corroded@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • xenoclast@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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