If you have read my blog before you will know I am quite interested in technology that keeps time. If partly because playing with the time settings on watches makes me feel like a time lord.
In fact daylight savings time and just casually shifting my clock forward or backwards an hour does make me feel like a god of time and creation, and then I remember that although time is a fact within the progression of a linear universe, the measurement system we use is entirely arbitrary, and changing to British Summer Time is just a way of mass brainwashing the public to changing their sleeping patterns to make better use of the days.
Anyway, no funky stories about the woman who sold time. Lets get into some lovely discussion about Atomic Clocks.
Scientists reporting on Nature - later picked up by the BBC – have reported that they have developed a strontium based atomic clock which is (loads of scientific numbers, okay 2–4 × 10−16 to 1.5 × 10−16) roughly 3 times as accurate.
There are two important terms used when working out what the best method to measure time is, the first is accuracy and the second is stability.
Accuracy is easily understood, it is how well the clock measures an event – in this case the movement of/within an atom – within one instance of that event. Given that mathematics and other understandings of physics gives us the ability to place that movement within a likely time frame, if the clock is within this time frame whilst also being more definite then we can calculate its accuracy (I’m making this up, tell me if I’m right) 
Stability is the determination of how well it keeps to this over time. So if we get a definition of a second as being a specific time unit, any variations in the operation that measures a second within the course of an hour will change the length of time that a second actually is. The thing about stability when it comes to measuring time is that it allows for variations. It is fine if a clock loses a second during a day as long as it gains a second the next day. Stability is defined over a longer period of time, so if by the end of 300 million years the clock still says what mathematically (based on the multiplication of the original measurement over the course of time) it should then you have achieved stability over that length of time. The current atomic clocks would lose a total of one second over 300 million years though there might be minor variations throughout the time period.
Brilliant right?
Yet once you reach a certain point of stability say 1 second in a 1 million years, why should we care? The clocks on our phones update automatically with the internet anyway? This will stop planes crashing into each other, keep our traffic lights regulated, and allow us to groan out of bed at the same time every morning. Surely that is enough?
Well as I always say to myself in situations which I am woefully under prepared for…
“Think big or get out…” (with more expletives of course)
So where does this incredible level of time calculation take us. Well currently computers do calculations at speeds faster than a second. Some mobile advertising transactions operate at 500,000,000th of a second. Computational speeds will get faster, and something needs to track how fast they are going, if only so we can decide whether the US or China has the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Also lets think in terms of automated transport which will surely get faster. The current Land Speed Record is approximately 763 mph. In seconds if my mathematics holds up is a speed of 0.2xxxx miles a second. Now if we take a comparison between me steering on my bike at a stately 16 mph and someone steering at those speeds, we can guess that the faster you go the more complicated steering becomes. So when we do end up driving this fast along streets we will probably need to be in automated cars – I’m holding out for the flying bicycle myself. Now whilst I doubt there will be T-junctions or four way crossings, there will still be traffic entering and exiting the lanes, more importantly if something goes wrong ahead and your car needs to stop it will need to do it in probably before 0.2xxxx of a mile, maybe immediately. That requires such an accurate measurement of timing to not only stop the first car, but to automatically stop all the cars that are effected behind the one you are in.
I am not going to get into space travel, that is a whole other blog post at some point in the future on space travel and time. For now I hope that I have given you a few interesting thoughts about atomic clocks, their usefulness to us, and why we should want them to be more precise.
