[ExI] The most accurate clock ever

[John Clark]

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
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