[roadcat]

“NIST-F2 is now an official source of time for the United States — it has an accuracy that's equivalent to about one second in 300 million years,”

What difference does it make? Mother nature changes the time with each major earthquake. The last few big earthquakes speeded up the rotation of the Earth and knocked seconds off the clock. Which means people still have to adjust clocks - even super-accurate atomic clocks.

[LukeL]

If the rotation of the earth speeds up, a second will still be a second (only difference is in relativity which would be almost immeasurable with such a small increase in rotational sped)

What a clock like this is good for is calibrating scientific equipment, measuring the speed of atomic particles, possibly the expansion of the universe, Doppler effect etc.

[DManA]

The definition of a second has nothing to do with the rotation of the Earth:

The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

[Arthur McGowan]

The last few big earthquakes speeded up the rotation of the Earth and knocked seconds off the clock.

Stop Global Speeding!!!

[zeugma]

What difference does it make? Mother nature changes the time with each major earthquake. The last few big earthquakes speeded up the rotation of the Earth and knocked seconds off the clock. Which means people still have to adjust clocks - even super-accurate atomic clocks.

Clocks like this aren't used to keep time. They are used to measure it. The more accurate the clock, the smaller increments that can be measured accurately. Atomic clocks are useful in a number of application where hyper-accurate measures of intervals are required.

 

[MosesKnows]

Mother nature changes the time with each major earthquake

No, she does not.

[dfwgator]

Does anybody really know what time it is?