The world’s first nuclear clock is on the horizon

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. Such devices underpin everything from GPS and the internet to stock-market trading. That may seem good enough for most. But in a paper recently published in Nature, researchers report being ready to build its successor: the nuclear clock. Ekkehard Peik, one of the field’s pioneers, says such a clock could be a factor of 1,000 times better than today’s standard atomic clocks.