A CLOCK for the next billion years:

Researchers are aiming for a clock accurate to within a tenth of a second over 14 billion years – the age of the universe.

The new research by Georgia Tech physicists, scientists in the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales in Australia and at the department of physics at the University of Nevada provides the blueprint for a nuclear clock that would get its extreme accuracy from the nucleus of a single thorium ion. Such a clock could be useful for certain forms of secure communication – and perhaps of greater interest – for studying the fundamental theories of physics.

A nuclear clock could be as much as one hundred times more accurate than current atomic clocks, which now serve as the basis for the global positioning system (GPS) and a broad range of important measurements.

But if I owned it, I’d forget to adjust for daylight savings time.