In yesterday's issue of the journal Nature Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reported they have made a new type of clock that is the most accurate ever, it's called a Ytterbium Lattice Clock. It's about 100 times better than any previous clock, if set at the time of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago today it would be off by less than one second.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0738-2 It's so good the main source of error is due to General Relativity, if you lift the clock up by just one centimeter the Earth's gravitational field is slightly weaker and so the clock runs noticeably faster, that may be why NIST is now working on a portable version of their Ytterbium Lattice Clock. If GPS satellites had clocks this good they'd know where they were relative to the Earth to within a centimeter and so could tell users on the ground where they were within a centimeter; and that would be more than good enough for jet fighters to automatically land on aircraft carriers without a pilot, even at night in a heavy fog in a bad storm with the deck tossing up and down. It would be by far the best instrument ever made to detect tiny changes in the gravitational field, and that would make it much easier to find things buried deep underground. The Earth just became more transparent. It might even be used to detect Gravitational Waves and Dark Matter. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
