Skip to main content

The world’s most accurate clock will lose just one second every 14 billion years

NIST

Whether it’s timing runners in a race, cooking dinner, or trying to get to the airport on time, the standard minutes, seconds, and milliseconds found on most digital clocks are more than enough to keep folks on schedule. But it’s possible for clocks to get a whole lot more accurate — and a clock built by researchers from National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, proves it. Their latest atomic clock, the most accurate ever created, can tell the time with an astonishing 18 digits of precision.

“For a few years now, there’s been work on developing a new breed of atomic clock called an optical clock,” Andrew Ludlow, the NIST physicist who led the project, told Digital Trends. “These are different to most atomic clocks that are used, with the main difference being that they operate in the optical domain. The internal ‘ticking’ of these clocks happens at a much, much higher frequency than most atomic clocks. A traditional system might have a ticking rate that’s more like a billion times a second. These new optical clocks, meanwhile, oscillate at a rate of a quadrillion times per second. This divides time up into finer intervals, giving us enhanced measurement for the resolution of [timekeeping].”

The optical lattice clock developed by Ludlow and his colleagues measures the oscillations of a ytterbium atom. Its atomic pendulum swings at a speed of 500 trillion times per second.

Given that we’d measure the timekeeping of a regular clock by testing it against one we know to be accurate, Ludlow said that testing a whole new benchmark of accuracy proves difficult. To check consistency, the team built two separate models of the atomic clock and then tested them both in separate locations, where gravity would normally cause slight alterations in their timekeeping.

“Any measurement that we make is, in fact, limited by the performance of the existing benchmark,” he said. “Really, the only thing you can do is to build two distinct systems and try and show relative comparisons between them to show that they are consistent with one another.”

The results showed that the clock is so stable in its timekeeping that it won’t gain or lose more than a single second in 14 billion years. As Ludlow said, noticing the difference compared with existing atomic clocks is “beyond the scope of human perception.” However, there are applications in which this will prove useful. In the lab, it could be used for detecting the mysterious substance known as dark matter. A more earthbound application will involve improving navigation systems to allow them to more accurately triangulate objects’ location.

A paper describing the project was recently published in Nature.

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more