The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks | Quanta Magazine

- “In short, it’s the irreversible rise of entropy that makes timekeeping possible, while both periodicity and complexity enhance clock performance.”

- “They found that an ideal clock — one that ticks with perfect periodicity — would burn an infinite amount of energy and produce infinite entropy, which isn’t possible. Thus, the accuracy of clocks is fundamentally limited.”

- “The first thing to note is that pretty much everything is a clock. Garbage announces the days with its worsening smell. Wrinkles mark the years. “You could tell time by measuring how cold your coffee has gotten on your coffee table,” said Huber, who is now at the Technical University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Inf... See more

- “… a clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes in which energy spreads out among more particles or into a broader area.”

- “One major aspect of the mystery of time is the fact that it doesn’t play the same role in quantum mechanics as other quantities, like position or momentum; physicists say there are no “time observables” — no exact, intrinsic time stamps on quantum particles that can be read off by measurements. Instead, time is a smoothly varying parameter in th... See more