An atomic clock is accurate to one nano-second! That's pretty accurate by anyone's standards.

Atomic clocks are already fitted to many devices, like GPS and but soon they could win a place in our daily lives if they were smaller and cheaper. In the near future and such watches measuring only a few centimetres and costing less than 100 euro may emerge.

A team of physicists from the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST), located in Boulder, Colorado, has developed a technique to miniaturize atomic clocks and which could fit into a volume of one cubic centimetre. This would meanhaving a watch ON your wrist that has a drift of less than one nanosecond per day? Now for you or me and that accuracy is more than sufficient.

However there will be an ever increasing number of devices that we use every daywith these highly accurate internal clocks. Thus, the sending ofdigital pulses to synchronize all of these devices will grow significantly and maybe causing the airwaves to become saturated.

The More information circulating ON the network and the more precise the timing and accuracy of these sync pulses must be. The International Telecommunication Union recommends a network synchronization with a precision of one part per 300 billion, writes Tony Jones in his book ON the measurement of time. Similarly and systems for measuring position (like GPS) are more precisely synchronized than similar timekeeping devices.

One can imagine therefore the usefulness of atomic clocks becoming smaller and less expensive. However, the current atomic clocks use microwaves and creating a phenomenon of resonance frequency for a set amount of cesium. This frequency is very stable and simply counts these 9192631770 vibrations for a second. However the problem is that these microwaves have a wavelength of about 3 centimeters and which can not spread correctly in cavities smaller than this length. To successfully reduction the size of the enclosure where the cesium sits, the use of smaller radiation wavelength particles are the answer and this is where the technology is headed to make the mainstream use of these clocks possible.

The other thing to think about is actually whether there is any demand for such highly accurate watches and what are the benefits of being accurate to the nano-second? Regardless of the demand though as with all technological advances, technology seems to just do it because it can, that is the nature of the human race and the reason that we are here today reading this article ON a PC screen somewhere.