Yeah, but in 1.8 trillion years, you’re going to be a minute late for everything.
I mean but this should save me some hassle from my current clock that I need to adjust every 10 billion years.
The Germans will be furious
*the Swiss
Oh shit I missed the sun explosion!
prove it
Remindme! 30 billion years
Just give me a little bit of time, I got this. You’re gonna see!
Surely in 30 billion years nothing could possibly happen to the supercooled strontium to throw that off, right?
Just checking… Was anyone on the team named Igor?
What do you set it to?
In clocks like this, the “set time” is often irrelevant. It’s more important to know exactly how much time has passed since the last time the clock was “checked.” If you’re running a radio transmitter at 6ghz, that’s 6 billion cycles per second. If you synch your transmitter to your clock once per second, it had better be accurate to the billionth of a second.
This. Clocks like this are for measuring duration in a scientific context.
The other atomic clocks that are averaged to give us our ground truth for time.
Standard seconds are defined based on measurable properties of a cesium atom. The historical definition of 1/86400th of a day doesn’t work for science if the duration is inconsistent.
For example the statement:
Earth’s Days Are Getting 2 seconds Longer Every 100,000 Years
becomes self-referencing and loses all meaning without some other reference point.
“I suppose”.
Boom, now it’s a scientific unit.
This is time relative to earth, and the actual passage of time in the universe that we aim to measure doesn’t care about the Earth’s rotation.
