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Published online 13 July 2001 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news010719-2
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Physicists better their time
New atomic timepiece clocks up more ticks.
In the most impressive feat of time management ever, scientists in Colorado have made a clock potentially so accurate that, had it started when the Earth was formed four and a half billion years ago, it might by now have slipped only a second or so.
Substantially more accurate than the best existing clocks, this development could allow physicists to measure the fundamental constants of the Universe with incredible Scott Diddams of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder and colleagues have, like others before them, used vibrations of atoms to measure time1.
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