Science After Sunclipse has some links to Conan O’Brien spinning his wedding ring and getting help from an MIT professor to maximize the spin time.
(BTW, I have colleagues who use the term “nutate” on a regular basis.)
Daily Archives: February 13, 2008
Trap Some Mercury, Make a Clock (Maybe)
“Trapping of Neutral Mercury Atoms and Prospects for Optical Lattice Clocks” Hachisu et al., PRL, 100(5). I haven’t had time to read the paper, but Chad at Uncertain Principles has a summary of it.
My personal nit is that everybody calls these clocks, and they are really frequency standards/references. But almost nobody cares about that.