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The mind-bending new science of measuring time
In windowless labs in Colorado sit the 20 atomic clocks the world sets its watch by. They’re barely keeping up
On the edge of town, protected by armed guards and detection dogs, the sprawling campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) lies in the shadow of the Flatirons range, between a cemetery and a dental office. One of the paper’s authors, the nuclear physicist Jun Ye, greeted me in his office at Jila, a collaboration between Nist and the University of Colorado Boulder, once known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and founded during the American “space race” with the Soviet Union. I wondered what lessons a person learns after years in a windowless lab, in a secure federal facility, accompanied by nothing but laser light, the hum of fine machinery and the near perfectly measured passage of time, which may or may not exist.
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