The researchers are adopting new technology and redefines seconds: – A milestone – Dagbladet.no

(Dagbladet): Over the last 50 years, has second as we know it has been defined the same way. But time may now soon be past.

German scientists think they have figured out how to make the most accurate clock ever and precision we then be astonishing.

If it had started to tick for 14 billion years ago during the Big Bang, it would only have “lost”, or inaccuracies of 100 seconds.

“Inaccurate”

for people will not the new level of precision be appreciable noticeable, but it may for example have an influence on where GPS systems are.

Time traditionally, as in old grandfather clocks, been measured by a pendulum that swings from side to side. The principle is the same in atomic clocks, but here used the natural motion of a cesium atom.

Since 1967, a second has been defined as the time it takes such an atom to move forward and to bake 9,192,631,770 times.

This provides a margin of error of about a nanosecond (0.000000001 seconds) every 30 days.

0.2 nanoseconds

the new method now presented in the journal Optica, describes a watch that instead uses strontium.

gauge one a second after the movements of a strontium atom, it will be equivalent to 429 billion times the same cycle.

When it comes to accuracy, the error margin will be 0.2 nanoseconds over 25 days. The margin of error is, in other words almost one fifth of a cesium clock.

Christian Grebing, which is one of the authors, refer to it as “a milestone”, but stressed that it would be reasonable to wait little by phasing in the new system.

– But the message is that we will gain from implementing these optical clocks, he said.