Keeping Time with Atoms
–It’s ten seconds to midnight on New Year’s Eve, but by whose watch? Like all standards, measurements of time are arbitrary, and only as good as the precision of each ‘tick.’ As no clock is perfect, each will eventually speed up or slow down, making that stroke of midnight a bit fuzzy. However, advances in physics and engineering over the past fifty years have decreased that uncertainty with the development of the gold standard of timekeeping: atomic clocks. Continue reading Keeping Time with Atoms