Atomic Clocks Can Now Tick Faster and Slower at the Same Time
Ben Sullivan
At the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, a single aluminum ion hangs suspended in a trap, cooled to fractions of a degree above absolute zero. It is, in practical terms, as close to nothing as physics permits. And yet it is doing something. The ion is vibrating, jittering through space with the restlessness that quantum mechanics demands of everything, everywhere, always. Those vibrations are tiny, almost unimaginably so. But they are enough. According to a paper...