![]() ![]() ![]() Some of the most accurate clocks on the planet are devices known as optical lattice clocks. “No matter where you find it in the universe, you get the same frequency of the pendulum.” “These jumps are a very fundamental quality of an atom, and they are the same for every atom of that type,” Lisdat said. They use the quantum jump of electrons as a pendulum. Since 1655, timekeeping has been all about building something that oscillates at a constant rate - be it a pendulum, a spring watch, or quartz crystals that vibrate if you pass an electric current through them.Ītomic clocks follow the same principle. “They call them clocks, but really what they are doing is taking the equivalent of tuning forks up to the top of a mountain and measuring the difference in frequency between the one at the top and the one at the bottom,” Agnew said. After all, in 10 years, two clocks that are 1,000 meters apart from each other in height will be off by just 31-millionths of a second, Agnew said.īut there are some atomic clocks that break a single second into such tiny parts that they can actually detect a minuscule shift in the speed of time. Most clocks aren’t accurate enough to register the difference in the speed of time at different altitudes. “Your body and your biological experience exist in the real time of whatever place you are in,” said Christian Lisdat, a physicist at Germany’s National Metrology Institute who worked on the study. That means your friend who lives in the Rockies is aging just a tiny bit faster than your friend who lives on the beach in Malibu. ![]()
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