A new study has found that it costs energy to keep accurate time.
Researchers built a simple clock and measured how accurate it was and how much energy it was consuming.
Like any other engine, the clock released part of the energy supplied to it as heat. When the researchers supplied more energy, the clock became more accurate, but at the cost of releasing more heat.
Thus, there is a price to measure time accurately.
So what does this tell us?
Clocks that are more accurate consume more energy than less accurate clocks. It also means that there is a limit to how accurate we can make our clocks - whether it be those used in GPS satellites or supercomputers, for example.
Like all other machines, clocks cannot escape one of the fundamental laws of nature - it is impossible to make a machine that is one hundred percent efficient with zero waste.
Original article:
Clocks that tell time more accurately use more energy – new research
Original study: