5 ms·
Current atomic clocks are 1 second every few hundred million years.
by jer0me 5y ago
Current atomic clocks are 1 second every few hundred million years.
- silisili 5y agoThat means it could be off by as much as 20 to 30 seconds when the sun finally burns out. Obviously unacceptable accuracy.
- foota 5y agoWhich in fairness is 1 microsecond every couple years, an easily measurable amount by a computer.
- sambroner 5y agoItd be hard for your computer to have the accuracy to detect it!
- notum 5y agoIt doesn't have to have the accuracy, if both computers had their own atomic clocks they would end up out of sync every couple of years, just like GPS satellites do.
- SamBam 5y agoWhat would your computer be comparing it to?
- CheezeIt 5y agoAnother atomic clock.
- p1esk 5y agoHow do we know which clock is the accurate one?
- kingkawn 5y agoThe one we arbitrarily choose
- CheezeIt 5y agoBoth are, up to the level of drift between them.
- CamperBob2 5y agoAnother atomic clock. (No, really: with three uncorrelated clocks you can separate their variances.)
- puzzledobserver 5y agoI'm speculating here, but I think the idea is to ascribe accuracy to processes, not to specific clocks. So you make two clocks on the same principle, say pendulum oscillations, and measure how quickly they start to disagree. Then you make two clocks based on a new principle, say quartz oscillations, and measure their rate of disagreement. You'll notice that the two quartz clocks agree with each other better than the two pendulum clocks do. So quartz clocks keep time better than pendulum clocks. Then you build a new type of clock, say of the atomic kind, and compare two atomic clocks to each other and to quartz clocks. As you repeat this process, I suppose the clock frequencies have to get progressively higher (Cesium clocks are measuring radiation at about 9 GHz), but this allows you to measure finer and finer discrepancies between them.
- credit_guy 5y agoDo you mean one microsecond every couple hundred years? Which would be a few nanoseconds per year?