Three one-thousandths of a second is less than 1/10th of a blink, less than 1/100th of a heartbeat. But if you’re a speedskater, 0.003 seconds can be the difference between gold and silver. So how are Olympics timekeepers able to get such ridiculous precision and accuracy? For the inside scoop, we talked to Omega’s Peter Hürzeler, head of Olympic timekeeping.
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Schematic of creating a space-time crystal.
In a googol of years or so, scientists expect the universe to enter a state known as “heat-death,” where there’s no thermodynamic free energy remaining and everything’s stopped moving. A clock that could keep time even after the heat-death would require a crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space, which would mean it is a four-dimensional crystal. There’s actually a practical use for such a 4D crystal during this epoch, as scientists would use the device to study complex physical properties and phenomena in the quantum world.
A team of researchers led by scientists from the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory have proposed the experimental design of such a 4D crystal. The paper, published on Arxiv, describes a device that uses an electric-field ion trap and Coulomb’s law to form a spatial ring crystal, which, once a weak static magnetic field is applied, will begin a rotation that will never stop. Theoretically, the rotation won’t stop even when the universe reaches entropy. According to the paper:
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Scientists turn a single atom into a bit, Kinect used to create impressive physics demo,
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