Man-Made Atomic Clocks the Best In the Universe 267
An anonymous reader writes "The widespread belief by astrophysicists that pulsars and white dwarfs are the best clocks in the universe is wrong, say two Australian physicists. John Hartnett and Andre Luiten from the University of Western Australia have recently shown that man-made terrestrial atomic clocks take the crown, contrary to numerous claims in astrophysical literature that the natural timing provided by pulsars and white dwarfs is the most precise. The preprint of their paper, available on the arXiv, shows that terrestrial clocks exceed the accuracy and stability of the astrophysical 'clocks' by all sensible measures, in some cases by several orders of magnitude."
Re:Yeah thats right. (Score:2, Insightful)
in dutch: hoogmoed komt voor de val.....
Religion is something man made, mostly based on something big that happened.... And at the moment they are mostly busy with child abuses, or blowing them selves up...
But saying that man made the best in the universe, without ever having left our solar system is a little bit naive...
Re:Yeah thats right. (Score:2, Insightful)
Duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that we're using atomic clocks to detect the rate of _spin_ _down_ of several neutron stars (and of course, starquakes and glitches), claiming that neutron stars are somehow superior is just stupid.
Precision is not the same as Accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary seems to use precision and accuracy interchangeably, they are in fact quite different.
Re:Duh. (Score:3, Insightful)
there is a strong ideological motivation for the claim that pulsars do it best.
consider that humans can do something new in the universe that the universe can not otherwise do
so this has implications on the nature of the universe and mans relationship to the universe
many of the resulting treatments crap on dominate assumptions that many people think are true
Re:Better than all natural clocks, perhaps. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah thats right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ditto. I thought it was very egotistical of us to believe that in the entire universe, our way is best.
There are 9 × 10^21 (9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the observable universe. Many of the stars themselves are unobservable, but we can see them because they are part of a galaxy that is obviously far away, and appears as a faint dot in our sky. That's only in the 46 billion light years from our lonely rock in the cosmos that we can observe.
The odds that there isn't another populated planet (or a few hundred thousand of them) is pretty slim. Some are likely to be as advanced as us. The possibility is there that some are more advanced. Or worse, they were more advanced but have long since died off, but their "perfect" clocks still exist and are still running.
But hey, more power to 'em. If they want to declare us the winners, I won't argue. We're the best. Yea! Humans!
Re:Precision is not the same as Accuracy (Score:3, Insightful)
The funny thing is you may be both right (and both wrong ;) The importance of accuracy vs precision for a clock really depends on how you want to use it.
Do you want to make sure you are on time for your meeting? Then it's better to be accurate. Do you want to build a good DAC? Then you better have a precise clock.
In the first case, you want to minimize drift from some accepted "true reference value" over time, but the precision of each pulse/tick probably won't matter. In the second, you want to minimize the difference between each tick, but it's ok if it slowly drifts over time...
Re:Yeah thats right. (Score:3, Insightful)