The definition of a second, the most fundamental unit of time in our current measurement system, hasn't been updated in more than 70 years (give or take some billionths of a second).
The current standard second is based on a 1957 experiment with an isotope, or variant, of cesium. When pulsed with a specific wavelength of microwave energy, the cesium atoms are at their most"excited" and release the largest possible number of photons, or units of light.
That initial definition of a second was tied to the length of a day in 1957 – and that, in turn, was linked to variable things, such as the rotation of Earth and the position of other celestial objects at that time,In contrast, optical atomic clocks measure the oscillation of atoms that"tick" much faster than cesium atoms when pulsed with light in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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