What is time anyway? Is it a fixed point? Flowing in one direction? Folding back onto itself? Is time travel possible? There’s still so much we don’t understand when it comes to time. But we are getting better at measuring it. And with that improvement comes new technological possibilities.
According to Big Think:
“However well we can keep time, then, determines what our technological capabilities will be. There are many tasks that require an incredibly accurate knowledge of time, synchronized across many different locations around the globe, and a few even beyond our terrestrial world. Any question you have about ‘which event occurred first’ or ‘how precisely can we measure the exact moment at which this event occurred’ can only be answered as well as you’re capable of measuring time according to the standard-of-rest (or reference frame) that we’ve selected.
At present, the atomic clock is the best technology we have for measuring time to the greatest precision of all…
Currently, the best atomic clocks are accurate to about 1 second in every 30 billion years, but nuclear clocks could up that to nearly 1 second in every one trillion years, which would be a remarkable improvement.
- Financial transactions could occur with ~picosecond accuracy.
- Global positioning could be achieved with ~millimeter precision.
- The gravitational changes in Earth could lead to us monitoring water-table changes by sub-centimeter levels.
- And radio astronomy, which is used today to image black holes with a telescope the effective diameter of Earth, could be extended into the space around Earth, leading to resolutions that are tens or even hundreds of times greater than at present.”
That last point is the most exciting to me. With resolutions that great we might finally be able to answer some of our most pressing questions about the Universe! Nuclear clocks here we come!
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Is a Nuclear Clock the Greatest Idea Ever?
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