Need a new clock?
ANDREW LUDLOW’S is no ordinary ticker. An intricate tangle of tubes, cables and lasers occupying an entire room at his lab in Boulder, Colorado, it is one of the best timekeeping devices ever made. “It’s the Lamborghini of atomic clocks,” he says.
That isn’t to say it is fast. But Yb-2, as the clock is known, is precision engineered. In fact, it should measure out each passing second so precisely that it wouldn’t miss a beat for around 20 billion years – more than the age of the universe.
This is the stunning frontier of precision at which timekeeping now finds itself. Clocks such as Ludlow’s could spur on as yet unheard-of technological innovations. They could transform our understanding of the universe, revealing wrinkles in established laws of physics and variations in the fundamental constants of nature that would otherwise be impossible to detect. But for metrologists like Ludlow, they raise an even more fundamental question: is it time once again to redefine time? [“Inside the incredibly slow race to reinvent time“, Rachel Nuwer, NewScientist (22 August 2020)]
A little baffled by this fascination? Don’t be. If you use a GPS, it depends on proper measurement of time.
And, yet, time itself is quite the mystery. Good article. I don’t need that clock in my house, though.
