This is right up Sheldon Cooper’s street (not that I understand his physics which is best explained here). A new paper suggests that the wave properties of matter (as contrasted to particle physics) could be used to measure time. If every rock is a potential clock Sheldon will have to change the rules of the “scissors, paper, rock” game. In any case, I look forward to a suitably acrimonius debate between Sheldon and Leslie Winkle on the nature of time and change.
A Clock Directly Linking Time to a Particle’s Mass, by Shau-Yu Lan, Pei-Chen Kuan, Brian Estey, Damon English, Justin M. Brown, Michael A. Hohensee and Holger Müller, Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1230767
Science Daily reports:
Taking advantage of the fact that, in nature, matter can be both a particle and a wave, he (Holger Müller, assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley) has discovered a way to tell time by counting the oscillations of a matter wave. A matter wave’s frequency is 10 billion times higher than that of visible light.
“A rock is a clock, so to speak,” Müller said.
In a paper appearing in the Jan. 11 issue of Science, Müller and his UC Berkeley colleagues describe how to tell time using only the matter wave of a cesium atom. He refers to his method as a Compton clock because it is based on the so-called Compton frequency of a matter wave. ……
…… While Müller’s Compton clock is still 100 million times less precise than today’s best atomic clocks, which employ aluminum ions, improvements in the technique could boost its precision to that of atomic clocks, including the cesium clocks now used to define the second, he said.
“This is a beautiful experiment and cleverly designed, but it is going to be controversial and hotly debated,” said John Close, a quantum physicist at The Australian National University in Canberra. “The question is, ‘Is the Compton frequency of atoms a clock or not a clock?’ Holger’s point is now made. It is a clock. I’ve made one, it works.”
The k2p blog 