Japan – The world’s techies are waiting with bated breath for the release of Apple’s smartwatch.
But however advanced it is, with its touchscreen and heart rate sensor, it won’t be able to match up to a clock just unveiled by Japanese scientists, which ‘ticks’ 430 trillion times a second.
The timepiece – hailed as the world’s most accurate – will lose only a second in the space of 16 billion years, making it 1 000 times more precise than the previous gold standard, the atomic clock.
Even the best atomic clocks are only accurate to around one second in every 100 million years, meaning that a new international standard for the second is now on the cards.
The new design has millions of super-cooled atoms held within a lattice of laser beams. A red laser is beamed at the atoms and the frequency of the emitted light is used to measure the passing of time.
Daily Mail