Physicists Made an Insanely Precise Clock That Keeps Time Using Entanglement (sciencealert.com) 65
fahrbot-bot quotes an article from Science Alert: Nothing keeps time like the beating heart of an atom. But even the crisp tick-tock of a vibrating nucleus is limited by uncertainties imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics.
Several years ago, researchers from MIT and the University of Belgrade in Serbia proposed that quantum entanglement could push clocks beyond this blurry boundary. Now, we have a proof of concept in the form of an experiment. Physicists connected together a cloud of ytterbium-171 atoms with streams of photons reflected from a surrounding hall of mirrors and measured the timing of their tiny wiggles.
Their results show that entangling atoms in this way could speed up the time-measuring process of atomic nuclei clocks, making them more precise than ever. In principle, a clock based on this new approach would lose just 100 milliseconds since the dawn of time itself.
Several years ago, researchers from MIT and the University of Belgrade in Serbia proposed that quantum entanglement could push clocks beyond this blurry boundary. Now, we have a proof of concept in the form of an experiment. Physicists connected together a cloud of ytterbium-171 atoms with streams of photons reflected from a surrounding hall of mirrors and measured the timing of their tiny wiggles.
Their results show that entangling atoms in this way could speed up the time-measuring process of atomic nuclei clocks, making them more precise than ever. In principle, a clock based on this new approach would lose just 100 milliseconds since the dawn of time itself.
Quantum entanglement is not hard to understand: (Score:5, Funny)
Socks come in pairs. If you put a sock on your left foot, the other sock of the pair instantly becomes the “right sock,” no matter where it is located in the universe.
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An electron was pulled over by the quantum state patrol...
The officer walked up to the car and said, "do you know how fast you were going?" To which the electron responded "no, but I know where I am!"
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Re:Quantum entanglement is not hard to understand: (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing that can travel faster than the speed of light and not violate relativity is the speed with which papers are published in peer reviewed Economics journals and some slashdot articles. These can travel faster than light because they contains no information.
Re:Quantum entanglement is not hard to understand: (Score:5, Funny)
Stupidity can travel faster than light. That's why you rarely see it coming.
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But that violates the idea nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
Not mass, not energy, not even information.
Nothing is "traveling".
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Re: Quantum entanglement is not hard to understand (Score:2)
Nope. You seem to not understand. With quantum entanglement, you can measure a property of an entangled particle and immediately know what the property of the other particle is. Unfortunately, you don't know when the property of the remote particle was actually measured. So you can't actually transmit information.
Re: Quantum entanglement is not hard to understand (Score:2)
Let's do something other than socks then, because that confuses some people.
A blind man with no sense of smell or touch takes apart a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, defined as two slices of bread, slathered in peanut butter and jelly, and pressed together sticky inward. It must add up to PB&J, not PB&PB or J&J, because physics. The slices of bread are now "entangled".
He physically separates the two halves any conceivable distance.
The man has as his only means of measurement, his sense of ta
Re: Quantum entanglement is not hard to understan (Score:2)
What you miss is that there are other measurements we can take other than âoepeanut butter or jellyâ, measurements that show that the bread is oscillating between peanut butter and jelly. And yet when we finally do measure which is which, it stops oscillating on one or the other. And the other half of the sandwich will be the opposite when it is measured. Itâ(TM)s a spinning coin until measurement, and we know it is spinning.
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âoeThe only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti
Depends on how you define (no)"thing" and "travel" (Score:1)
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Lots of things travel faster than light.
The speed of light is the speed of causality which means I do something, the effe
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Different photons hitting the two points. No photon is traveling between them.
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Is that also why you cannot prove the existence of the other sock after it's been put through the dryer?
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Is that also why you cannot prove the existence of the other sock after it's been put through the dryer?
Better still, until you open the dryer, the right sock is superposed in present and missing states until it is observed.
In principle, a clock based on this new approach would lose just 100 milliseconds since the dawn of time itself.
Admittedly, "since the dawn of time itself" is borderline wordsmith country, but aren't you churching it up a bit when you go all "100 milliseconds" when a tenth of a second would suffice?
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aren't you churching it up a bit when you go all "100 milliseconds" when a tenth of a second would suffice?
Accuracy. 0.1 s has a slop of 0.05, meaning it could actually be 0.05 - 0.14 s.
But 100 ms indicates a more stringent error -- 0.5 ms, meaning 99.5 to 100.4 ms. That's still a tenth of a second, but with a MUCH small error window.
Didn't you learn that back in Physics class in high school? Then again, exactly 100 seems a bit too "pretty" and precise for the precision indicated. I'd have expected less zeros -- so you might be correct while being wrong.
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But 100 ms indicates a more stringent error -- 0.5 ms, meaning 99.5 to 100.4 ms.
No, that would be 100. ms.
100 ms has just one significant digit and therefore is exactly as precise as 0.1 s.
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No, that would be 100. ms.
That is really a matter of convention, and depends on your local (geographically or in terms of research field) punctuation tradition.
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Well yes, the use of a trailing separator to indicate precision is more of a convention, but that is because the use of trailing zeroes without a decimal separator is ambiguous. In the context of the GP post, he was suggesting that 100 ms has three significant figures, which is not automatically true. In the strictest sense it is not true, but if by your measurement you intend it to be true, you must choose a method to indicate that. Either a trailing separator, or preferably a different notation, such as 1
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I think it's reasonable when the context is high-precision measurements, which only has utility when considering very small timescales much smaller than a second. Consider that people are more likely to say "6 seconds" than "a tenth of a minute" under most circumstances. Likewise, 10 centimeters vs. a tenth of a meter.
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Since they know that is is accurate to within 100 milliseconds since the dawn of time, I wonder what they were using to measure against to arrive at this number -- and since that obviously perfectly accurate thing already exists, then what is all the hoopla about? The invention of something less accurate than already exists? Break out the bourbon!
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Pffft no need for Quantum to do that. Classical physics solved that problem long ago. The "other sock" in the pair is always the "right" one providing you rotate your reference frame accordingly.
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> If you put a sock on your left foot, the other sock of the pair instantly becomes the âoeright sock,â no matter where it is located in the universe.
That an interesting analogy, thanks. In some ways it's helpful, to think of it in that simple way.
Of course, nothing, nothing at all happens to the other sock.
It's just mental masturbation to say that whichever sock isn't the left sock is therefore called the right sock. Maybe interesting to philosophers. Unfortunately that's true of most all e
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Look up "Local Hidden Variables" and "Bell's Inequality" to find out why this doesn't work as an explanation of quantum entanglement.
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This is so fscking brilliant, with your permission I'm going to use it as an email signature :-)
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Huh? It's tremendously useful for many things, especially the many things we depend on that rely on ultra precise measurements .. either you already knew that and are simply trolling (hopefully) or are too dumb to even understand the uses. We don't need to explain basics of how modern technology works to you.
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But how does this "insanely precise" clock handle daylight savings time if one of the entangled particles is in a different time zone?
Or is it like the clock in my car, where it's always both daylight savings and not daylight savings.
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Ya, that crazy Einstein back then. More physics without a use, then. And quantum mechanics, what a boondoggle that was. Sheesh, all those crazy little things no one could see exchanging particles, engaging in illicit fields, becoming entangled in questionable relationships. Who needed it? What use was it?
And what the hell was Newton thinking with that gravitational constant? Load of tosh. Aristotle and the Greeks with their nutty mathematics and logic, no one needed that. Hell, the pyramids were built witho
I may be obtuse, but isn't this (Score:1)
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Interesting. I was actually speculating about this very point recently and got to wondering if they actually somehow made a computer cpu with a clock speed operating in that frequency range, would its components inherently glow while in operation?
Date Time Classes (Score:2)
But relativity (Score:2)
So if you carried it across the lab, would that much acc/deceleration throw that precision figure off? For that matter, would gravitational perturbations from other heavenly bodies affect that kind of precision as well?
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no tau is too tiny BUT move an atomic clock up or down and clocks of ten years ago could detect time difference due to gravitational potential in 30 cm distance, in accordance with GR
https://www.nist.gov/news-even... [nist.gov]
The TL;DR version: (Score:3)
Except in the Quantum case the people are actually atoms, and the parade are atoms marching (spinning) to an entangled beat, so are easier (and faster) to measure so that using them as your timing source is more accurate.
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damn batteries (Score:2)
The battery in the laser pointer ran out and I was late for work.
Anything more accurate than 1s is purely for ego (Score:2)
100 milliseconds? (Score:2)
Re: 100 milliseconds? (Score:2)
Doesn't sound as cool.
Be happy they didn't use eye bats or bat heart beatings or Beatles heart-wrencher beat beats.
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Why not just say one tenth of a second?
Sure, the parent still talking about their "37-month old" child is an idiot. But in this case, I think the choice of words actually works to enhance a story about extreme accuracy.
Also, we humans like to arrogantly brag. 100 milliseconds sounds far more impressive. There's a reason we still use horses to measure the power output of bulldozers and boat motors.
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They're not the same in most common uses. Just like saying that something takes 5 minutes has a different expectation than saying something takes 300 seconds.
0.1 s +/- 0.05s
or
0.100 s +/- 0.0005 s
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Why not just say one tenth of a second?
Because it's not the same thing -- you see, numbers encode not only an absolute value, but also an expectation of accuracy.
"1/10th of a second" means "less than 1/9th, but more than 1/11th" -- so it could easily be 110 ms or so.
So "less than 100 ms" means "99.99... ms at most", which is a 10% lower upper-limit than 1/10th of a second :-)
TIME LORDS (Score:2)
I wonder if they set this entanglement clock five minutes ahead so they're not late getting out the door in the morning. It works like a charm for me.
Re: TIME LORDS (Score:2)
I always wonder how that works for some people. Aren't you autmatically slacking off five more minutes because you know your clock is five minutes.ofd?
Re: TIME LORDS (Score:2)
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It does not work that way. I used to set the clock and alarm two hours ahead so that when it went off at "getting up time" a groggy look would cause jumping out of bed in panic because of being late, and by the time it registered that the clock was set two hours ahead, it was too late to go back to sleep for just a few minutes more.
It was also effective to plant multiple alarm clocks that went of at slightly different times in various unreachable places so that one had to get up and navigate across the roo
Props to whoever does science in Belgrade... (Score:2)
....of all places.
I still remember it being a war-torn heap of rubble on ruins, with snipers in every ugly Soviet-style high-rise.
Really, it's nice every time I see Europe's Afghanistan (the Balkan) enjoying a bit of the good life.
Same thing happened... (Score:3)
The Rreal question is (Score:1)
So now my fancy cool atom clock is outdated (Score:1)
"In principle, a clock based on this new approach would lose just 100 milliseconds since the dawn of time itself."
I mean that's just cool. I can't even imagine how precise that is. I wonder how much it drifts per year? Can calculators even compute that since it's so many zeros?
Now I'm wondering when I can buy a clock that use this method? I have a thing for clocks. I love clocks with a transparent backside so I can watch the mechanism and its engineering beauty. It's mesmerizing to watch it. Although the at