In Vienna and Beijing, the first (thorium) nuclear clocks begin to tick
gumby
70 points
7 comments
October 07, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (4 comments)
dgacmu
The actual journal article, since NYT didn't bother linking to it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11084-4
writtenone
archived no paywall: https://nonograph.com/in-vienna-and-beijing-the-first-nuclea...
austin-cheney
According to Wikipedia thorium is probably created from neutron stars or supernovae making it one of the rarest elements in the galaxy. But, it’s quite abundant on Earth, maybe 3x as abundant as Uranium on earths crust. Because of this abundance it is, along with Radon, the primary constituent of earths natural background radiation.
pclowes
How do they know the accuracy of the clock? Eg: 2s of drift in 65M years. Naively, measuring that seems more difficult than the clock. Wouldn’t you need a perfect clock as a baseline? There must be something really clever here.