Physicists find ultimate limit for how accurate clocks can be

There is a fundamental trade-off between making a clock accurate and counting ever shorter ticks, due to the second law of thermodynamics. This trade-off could one day be important for clocks in quantum computers, where computing operations occur on extremely short timescales with high accuracy.

A common way of expressing the second law of thermodynamics is that the amount of disorder in a system (its entropy) must always increase over time. As a consequence of this increasing disorder, there is…