5 ms·
Well it’s for other things than just telling you what time it is. You could have a GPS that is far more precise. Or a altimeter that detects height changes bas
by LASR 5y ago
Well it’s for other things than just telling you what time it is.
You could have a GPS that is far more precise. Or a altimeter that detects height changes based on gravitational time-dilation.
There are tons of things you can build on top of precision timing.
The use cases may have nothing to do with time, like in the altimeter case.
- dguest 5y agoGiving your GPS the ability to calculate gravitational time dilation would be cool. According to Wikipedia [1] gravitational redshift is about 1e-16 per meter. Someone else posted a clock costing around $2k with a precision of around 1e-11 [2], so, the current commercial clock is giving us the elevation with a precision of around 100km. To get per-meter resolution we'd need 1e-16 precision, which is on par with the more "standard" clocks in research laboratories and better than the clocks we put on GPS satellites by a few orders of magnitude. Unfortunately that just puts us on par with an existing GPS. On the other hand, the bleeding-edge optical-lattice based atomic clocks described in this article give us altimeters with mm resolution. So we might actually be reaching the point where atomic clocks would be useful in "everyday devices". All it takes is for someone to shrink a tabletop experiment down to the size of a bar of soap, and to make it work without all the climate control, electromagnetic shielding, and vibration damping that come standard in a state-of-the-art atomic physics lab. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_redshift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_redshift [2]: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14830
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]