FOR THE discerning timekeeper, only an atomic clock will do. Whereas the best quartz timepieces will lose a millisecond every six weeks, an atomic clock might not lose a thousandth of one in a decade.

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Atomic clocks are the most accurate timekeepers we have, losing only seconds across billions of years. But apparently that’s not accurate enough – nuclear clocks could steal their thunder, speeding up ...

Physicists have made one of the highest performance atomic clocks ever. ­­ Their instrument, known as an optical lattice atomic clock, can measure differences in time to a precision equivalent to ...

Physicists from the University of Colorado have created an atomic clock so precise it can measure gravitational time dilation over distances as small as one millimeter. This record-breaking ...

That big grandfather clock in the library might be an impressive piece of mechanical ingenuity, and an even better example of fine cabinetry, but we’d expect that the accuracy of a pendulum timepiece ...

The heart of a minuscule atomic clock—believed to be 100 times smaller than any other atomic clock—has been demonstrated by scientists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and ...

A millimeter might not seem like much. But even a distance that small can alter the flow of time. “This is fantastic,” says theoretical physicist Marianna Safronova of the University of Delaware in ...

The world’s most precise atomic clock has confirmed that the time dilation predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity works on the scale of millimetres. Physicists have been unable to ...