But both O’Brian and Jefferts point out that the technological applications of today’s atomic clocks weren’t apparent when they were first invented. What will we do once we reach the ability to break down time into super-tiny, hyper-accurate units? Nobody knows. There is currently a large international push to find a method of even better timekeeping, though exactly which one will prevail is yet to be seen. If engineers want to get more accurate, they will have to find some other natural process that can be used to measure time and it “will require a whole bunch of people agreeing for that to happen,” said Jefferts. In 1967, scientists got together and defined one second as equivalent to the time it takes a cesium atom to move 9,192,631,770 times between two particular energy levels. “In the not to distant future, we will end up redefining the second,” said Steve Jefferts, who led the NIST project to develop the new atomic clock. It's important then that the ultimate reference standard has much better performance than the real world technologies. Real world clocks must operate under strained conditions such as temperature swings, significant vibration, or changing magnetic fields that degrade and hamper their accuracy. Your smartphone doesn’t display the time to the sixteenth decimal place, but it still relies on the frequency standards coming from NIST's clocks, which make their measurements while living in a tightly controlled lab environment. GPS, in turn, is used for synchronizing digital networks such as cell phones and the NTP servers that provide the backbone of the internet. These satellites rely on high precision coming from atomic clocks at the U.S. GPS, for instance, needs accuracy of about a billionth of a second in order to keep you from getting lost. ![]() Precise timekeeping underpins much of our modern world. The advancement is more than just a feather in the cap for metrology nerds.
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