Atomic clocks shrunk, now use lasers

The atomic clocks that reassure us that we are late to work may soon be shrunk in size. A traditional atomic clock is about the size of a refrigerator and seems inaccurate to the latest idea and concept.

The entire mind boggling idea is based around a laser and being able to trap atoms in space and then monitoring their energy state to calculate one second of time.

"Using this method, the team has calculated the second to be 1506 million cycles of microwaves for aluminium-27 and 2678 million cycles for gallium-69."

This impressive process that will allow us all to keep track of time even more precisely than before. It's quite the thought that only a few hundred years ago we kept track of time by the position of the sun and now we track time by the energy field of atoms.