Related papers: Time as it could Be measured in Artificial Living …

Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It allows for the timely reaction to regular or predicted events, reducing the pressure for fast processing of sensory input. Thus,…

A fundamental description of time can be consistent not only with the usual monotonic behavior but also with a periodic physical clock variable, coupled to the degrees of freedom of a system evolving in time. Generically, one would in fact…

Time plays a fundamental role in our ability to make sense of the physical laws in the world around us. The nature of time has puzzled people -- from the ancient Greeks to the present day -- resulting in a long running debate between…

In earlier papers we showed unpredictability beyond quantum uncertainty in atomic clocks, ensuing from a proven gap between given evidence and explanations of that evidence. Here we reconceive a clock, not as an isolated entity, but as…

Circadian clocks are the central timekeepers of life, allowing cells to anticipate changes between day and night. Experiments in recent years have revealed that circadian clocks can be highly stable, raising the question how reliably they…

Optical atomic clocks represent the state-of-the-art in the frontier of modern measurement science. In this article we provide a detailed review on the development of optical atomic clocks that are based on trapped single ions and many…

Measuring time means counting the occurrence of periodic phenomena. Over the past centuries a major effort was put to make stable and precise oscillators to be used as clock regulators. Here we consider a different class of clocks based on…

Time remains one of the least well understood concepts in physics, most notably in quantum mechanics. A central goal is to find the fundamental limits of measuring time. One of the main obstacles is the fact that time is not an observable…

A general definition of a clock is proposed, and the role of clocks in establishing temporal pre-conditions in quantum mechanical questions is critically discussed. The different status of clocks as used by theorists external to a system…

There are many different types of time keeping devices. We use the phrase ticking clock to describe those which -- simply put -- "tick" at approximately regular intervals. Various important results have been derived for ticking clocks, and…

To estimate the time, many organisms, ranging from cyanobacteria to animals, employ a circadian clock which is based on a limit-cycle oscillator that can tick autonomously with a nearly 24h period. Yet, a limit-cycle oscillator is not…

Many measurements on soft condensed matter (e.g., biological and materials) systems track low-dimensional observables projected from the full system phase space as a function of time. Examples are dynamic structure factors, spectroscopic…

We present a derivation of the structure and dynamics of a ticking clock by showing that for finite systems a single natural principle serves to distinguish what we understand as ticking clocks from time-keeping systems in general. As a…

We show that if one or more of the `constants' of Nature can vary then their values, as measured in the laboratory, should oscillate over the year in a very particular way. These seasonal changes in the constants could well be detected, in…

We consider the situation in which an observer internal to an isolated system wants to measure the total energy of the isolated system (this includes his own energy, that of the measuring device and clocks used, etc...). We show that he can…

Continuous clocks, i.e. the clocks that measure time in a continuous manner, are regarded as an essential component of sensing technology. Precision and recurrence time are two basic features of continuous clocks. In this paper, in the…

A clock is, from an information-theoretic perspective, a system that emits information about time. One may therefore ask whether the theory of information imposes any constraints on the maximum precision of clocks. Here we show a…

Time plays a crucial role in the intuitive understanding of the world around us. Within quantum mechanics, however, time is not usually treated as an observable quantity; it enters merely as a parameter in the laws of motion of physical…

The performance of optical clocks has strongly progressed in recent years, and accuracies and instabilities of 1 part in 10^18 are expected in the near future. The operation of optical clocks in space provides new scientific and…

Understanding different aspects of time is at the core of many areas in theoretical physics. Minimal models of continuous stochastic and quantum clocks have been proposed to explore fundamental limitations on the performance of timekeeping…