I was reading and i came across a statement saying it would take so many years for a cesium atomic clock to lose one second... I was wondering it would lose that one second compared to what? and also pendulums work off of gravity to tell their time...what forces cause the cesium atom to keep vibrating
Comapred to caesium-133. If it doesn´t loose energy, why should it be KEPT vibrating. It vibrates until some forces change.Newton's first law. My question would be why does it loose that one second over time. My guess would be due to gravity?
That's a good question here. I don't actually know, but I would guess that they would have to measure this relative to other atomic clocks. So, if you start with some number of cesium atomic clocks that are initially synchronized you will find that gradually they will become unsynchronized. I guess you then could translate that into an average drift in years/s. That is just a guess, but what other kind of clock could you use? -Dale
Dale is correct. Take two identical clocks, and measure how long they take to get out of sync with each other. For caesium clocks, it is a very long time.
Isn't there a slight consistancy problem with any kind of atomic measurment? I was assume this follows from the Uncertainy (spelling?) principle.
Atomic clocks have a well established habit of seeming to work very regularly for a while, then suddenly inexplicably going nuts. This was brought to public attention in the debunking of the infamous HK fiasco.
Hum, technically they are out of sync as soon as the two `identical` clocks are started. The difference, an arbitrary length of time such as a `second`, between the two clocks is a convenient point to determine the overall accuracy. See this article about an experimental atomic clock based on a single mercury atom that is at least five times more precise than the national standard clock based on a “fountain” of caesium atoms, according to a paper by physicists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the July 14 issue of Physical Review Letters. http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/mercury_atomic_clock.htm
