Nanotime

The new chapter of Galison's Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps - or maybe Aczel's God's Equation - on microtime, went online last month.

Physicists tell time by measuring oscillations of atoms: classically caesium, now universe-level-accurate strontium. Maxwell's old daemon, by which detection heats up what you're measuring, nudges the atoms - which presents a noticeable error for strontium. Yay entropy! Anyway it seems Eliot Bohr (yes, one of those Bohrs) has worked around this by detecting (=nudging) one set of atoms, then the next set, then others before returning to the first lot which is now cooler again.

Eliot should get a Nobel... in engineering.

I'm getting into this now as we're seeing/hearing pushback on photon-transfer in space. Beaming power, or data, is not as accurate as it should be; requiring a wider band, wasting the edges. Better clocks would improve accuracy - so, power and bandwidth respectively. The space-to-Earth pipeline has other problems, which Portal didn't know in 1986; but I reckon point-to-point in space means (1) negligible interference and (2) accuracy matters even more at the deciAU level, like from planetary L1/2 to L4/5.