Lizzie Gibney
speaker
564 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 14 Aug
Lizzie Gibney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Exactly.
And we use this really precise time for all kinds of things, for GPS to work, to synchronise mobile phone networks, computing systems.
It's really, really important, even if we don't always notice it across society.
So at the moment, we have these optical atomic clocks.
But now what we have, which was new earlier this month,
is a completely different way of doing this.
So rather than getting your tick from the energy levels of electrons, this plot gets them from the energy levels of nuclei.
So the nucleus of thorium-229.
Exactly.
So nuclei have energy levels, and that comes from the different configurations that you can have of their protons and neutrons.
And thorium is very unusual in it that it has these two energy levels that are very close together.
So with a laser, you can actually nudge that in the lab.
And two teams have now done that.
So for scientific reasons is a big one.
So what's quite exciting about this particular clock is that the way that it's made, the fact that you're using these nuclear energy levels, lots of different kinds of dark matter predicted that they would mess with the forces that bind the nucleus.
So if we are basically studying these nuclear energy levels, you can look for the effects of dark matter, changing the strength of fundamental forces, because that would also then change the tick speed.
So one use is fundamental physics.
But another is that actually, you know, the best clocks that we have that are, I think, you know, is one to...
what, they lose a second over 40 billion years.
You know, they're inside labs.
Showing 541–560 of 564 · page 28 of 29
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