4 ms·
I think it is more than pedantry. The clock will not last even a billionth of "300B years", and losing a whole second would be disastrous to its purpose. The
by deepspace 5y ago
I think it is more than pedantry. The clock will not last even a billionth of "300B years", and losing a whole second would be disastrous to its purpose. The kind of people who are interested in atomic clocks can surely understand "loses only 3 picoseconds per year".
- fsh 5y agoA car can measure its speed in kilometers per hour without having to travel for an hour. The choice of units is completely arbitrary and is ultimately a matter of taste. Most people know what a second is, and that a billion years is a really long time. They probably have no idea what a picosecond is. Clock experts generally use fractional frequency errors which have no unit at all.