Good time in Poland

Visitors to Poland generally have a good time and the time tourists spend in Poland will be much better from this day forward. It’s all due to Poland’s new optical atomic clock. Scientists say it will keep better time than all previous clocks.

Basic concept

The incredibly accurate clock is ticking away at the National Laboratory for Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (KL FAMO) in Poland. Actually, it’s not really ticking because this is an optical atomic clock. But, this one is so accurate that it would take billions of years to reach an error of one second. To put this in perspective, if you started this clock at the moment of the big bang, it would have lost only about one-tenth of a second by now. 

There won’t be a nightstand version of this clock anytime soon. It’s so big that this timepiece occupies four rooms at KL FAMO. The design of the clock shoots laser beams at suspended Strontium isotopes, which have an atomic half-life that is measured in billions of years. Optical atomic clocks are brand new technology, but they are so much more accurate than the traditional atomic clocks laboratories use for time-based experiments all over the world. 

Having a highly accurate way of tracking the passage of time that goes by quicker than the blink of an eye is of vital importance when testing aspects of general relativity and particle physics.

Now that’s something you can set your watch by.