> In all of human history, it’s always been the case that whenever you have a scientific advance, new technological applications and capabilities are certain to follow. Even in a field as mundane as timekeeping, ancient advances from sundials to pendulum clocks to quartz clocks enabled technologies like remote synchronization and reliable navigation across the globe, day or night.
This is why it is so important for society (at large, i.e. across earth) to invest in science. Knowledge is, in itself, valuable to have.
We already have almost all of what nuclear clocks can deliver. The existing "super" atomic clocks are just too complicated and expensive to make it worth deploying them. Smaller, cheaper, lower maintenance is what we need. And there's no evidence a thorium clock would be any better on that front. Not, honestly, that there even seems to be much market pressure pushing in this direction.
Of course, anyone who actually works with NIST or its counterparts might well want all the accuracy they can get, so it makes sense that they'd get excited! But that is not most people. The list of potential applications in the article is utter hogwash.
Would whoever is downvoting care to defend the article's claims? Maybe this one:
> the timescale for light to cross an atomic nucleus is a factor of 100,000 shorter than the time to cross an atom, and so if there are any physical effects that preferentially affect these longer timescales as compared to shorter ones, the difference between atomic and nuclear clocks could reveal them.
Because that claim is nonsense. It is very, very, very difficult to resolve discrepancies between two measurements, one of which is 10^4 times more accurate (the article's number, repeated multiple times). It just disappears into the uncertainty of the less accurate measurement. So you need to improve the less accurate measurement, but you can't do that because the way you gained your accuracy was also the way you gained your signal. Yes, this can be worked with, but it's not something nuclear clocks will ever do alone.
My main thesis, that nuclear clocks do not serve any market between the current cesium/rubidium standards and the national metrology labs' best, still stands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_thorium#Thorium-22...
Fascinatingly weird physics!