About the world’s most precise atomic clock: #NIST-F2
In April 2014, America activated its new and even more precise atomic clock, the NIST-F2, 10x more accurate than his predecessor. (NIST-F1, in 2000)
The precision of this clock starts to raise questions because of gravity’s influence on #time and hence practical issues such as where the clock is positioned; put it one floor higher the clock would already be ticking faster.
The question is: do we really need such a precision, for other reasons than e.g. calibrate other atomic clocks?
“At this level, maintaining absolute time scale on earth is in fact turning into nightmare,” Ye says. This clock they’ve built doesn’t just look chaotic. It is turning our sense of time into chaos.
Ye suspects the only way we will be able to keep time in the future is to send these new clocks into space. Far from the earth’s surface, the clocks would be better able to stay in synch, and perhaps our unified sense of time could be preserved.
others think
“Scientists can make these clocks into exquisite devices for sensing a whole bunch of different things,” O’Brian says. Their extraordinary sensitivity to gravity might allow them to map the interior of the earth, or help scientists find water and other resources underground.
A network of clocks in space might be used to detect gravitational waves from black holes and exploding stars.
▻http://www.npr.org/2014/11/03/361069820/new-clock-may-end-time-as-we-know-it
About the NIST-2: