alt Hacker News> Today’s best atomic clocks are billions of times more accurate and precise than any other type of clock. If they had been running since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, they would have lost or gained less than a second.
Absolutely incredible, but then confused by the next assertion that is made without context:
> New kinds of clocks may soon open up capabilities that previous generations could only dream about.
What is possible by pushing past that incredibly narrow margin of 1s in 13b years? What dreamy capabilities do we get that we don’t enjoy today?
Edit: I’d assumed they were talking about new approaches to making these clocks more accurate, but I wonder if they’re referring to power and form factors? I.E. an atomic clock the size of a grain of rice: https://www.nist.gov/noac/success-story-chip-scale-atomic-cl...
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Pretty sure you can rig something far better than radar if you have the ability to detect extremely tiny gravitational waves via an array of hyper-accurate clocks.
There are still big leaps, like their optical lattice clock that's sensitive to the gravitational difference caused by tidal effects on the earth's crust.
It can detect gravitational differences of a few cm!
In radio astronomy, more precise clocks can directly improve the quality/resolution of observations.
> Data received at each antenna in the array include arrival times from a local atomic clock, such as a hydrogen maser. At a later time, the data are correlated with data from other antennas that recorded the same radio signal, to produce the resulting image. The resolution achievable using interferometry is proportional to the observing frequency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...
> What dreamy capabilities do we get that we don’t enjoy today?
The next gen will have an alarm with snooze button.
> What is possible by pushing past that incredibly narrow margin of 1s in 13b years? What dreamy capabilities do we get that we don’t enjoy today?
You can measure speed (via special relativity) and altitude (via gravity/general relativity) with atomic clocks [0], so with a more accurate clock, you should be able to calculate your speed/altitude more accurately.
GPS is already pretty good at measuring speed/altitude, but its not always very accurate, and it only works if you can receive the satellite's signal. In theory, a more accurate atomic clock would solve both of these problems (as long as you had an equally-accurate clock at a fixed location to compare to).
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16473776