31–40 of 45 posts
Ask: Such synchronous clocks possible? Special and general relativity steam-roll over synched digit accuracy, at introducing any object's mass, any object's displacement. Not gain or lose over five billion years? How many digits this time? Tides, quakes, rain on the roof, defeat the possibility of unbounded synched accuracy.
One thing I'm really curious about: How can you measure the accuracy of the world's most accurate clock? By definition there would be no more accurate timing device to benchmark it against so is the accuracy cited in the article only theoretical?
The lattice clock in this story has numerous clusters of atoms. They could fill only a few clusters and measure the performance relative to a good clock, then statistically derive how much it would improve by using the full set of clusters.
Microsoft's Win32 time is only meant to prevent Kerberos error, so under 5 minutes is "fine".
One thing I'm really curious about: How can you measure the accuracy of the world's most accurate clock? By definition there would be no more accurate timing device to benchmark it against so is the accuracy cited in the article only theoretical?
Does it beat the pulsar clock [1]? And will standing next to clock make it go wrong because of the change of the gravitational field? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar_clock
At this level of accuracy things are pretty strange. It used to bug me when you had to tune RF circuits at a distance with non-conductive tools because your body capacitance would throw the tuning off. Having a clock that just being near it will change what time it reads, well that is a whole different ballgame of weird is it not? On a science note, why isn't this a gravity wave detector anyway?
It turns out there are some ultraviolet nuclear transitions. The line widths promise to be obscenely narrow. If they can get it working in a clock, they will be able to directly measure gravitational time dilation of small masses.
Meanwhile on servers running Windows, keeping sync to within a few seconds is a mighty challenge, esp. with Hyper-V. (Linux guests have no issue with ms or sub-ms accuracy.) Microsoft's Win32 time is only meant to prevent Kerberos error, so under 5 minutes is "fine".
Hate to be that guy when it comes to being pedantic about headlines, but wouldn't a `quantum leap` in accuracy be rather un-noteworthy?
I can here to make that exact comment. It always irks me that a lot of people don't realize 'quantum' == 'small'.
"Quantum leap" connotes an unpredictability in the magnitude of the change in common usage. Over time, the understanding has drifted a bit to include, usually, the idea of significant magnitude.
Meanwhile on servers running Windows, keeping sync to within a few seconds is a mighty challenge, esp. with Hyper-V. (Linux guests have no issue with ms or sub-ms accuracy.) Microsoft's Win32 time is only meant to prevent Kerberos error, so under 5 minutes is "fine".
If you're using win32 time for anything that needs accuracy greater than a few seconds, I think you're doing it wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're using win32 time for anything that needs accuracy greater than a few seconds, I think you're doing it wrong.
Do you know of anything more accurate, especially under Hyper-V? I've tried installing ntpd and even using the most aggressive settings and host time sync off, they drift like mad and the system log is filled with kernel warnings about time changes.