Archive for November 3rd, 2001

the Optical Atomic Clock

Saturday, November 3rd, 2001

On the back page of the new (Dec ‘01) Wired: The optical atomic clock being developed at NIST. It’s 1,000 times more precise than the current generation of atomic clock. Its pendulum swings 532,361 times for each tick of the clock, which itself is about once per nanosecond. The photo Joe Toreno took for us is a must-see; I’m not just hawking magazines here.

Meanwhile, I’m amazed that I had to manually reset half the gadgets at home from Daylight Saving Time - even the ones that know the date and year.