Talk:Nuclear clock

Nuclear clock (final version) received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which on 21 September 2024 was archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

Web search problem

Does anybody know how to search for "Nuclear clock" without getting thousands of results relating to the "Doomsday Clock"? 174.25.58.172 (talk) 02:44, 15 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(A bit late, but) Since there's only one isotope which is remotely practical, searching for "229m" and "thorium" works well for me. 97.102.205.224 (talk) 17:51, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ionization energy

@Ehrenkater: You write: "Isn't the outer shell ionisation energy more relevant?". Er, yes, that's what the first ionization energy is. It's the minimum energy required to remove an electron from the atom, which is obviously going to be an outer-shell electron. I didn't feel the need to belabour the point. Can you clarify your question, or perhaps I should say clarify your confusion so I can phrase things to not send a reader down the false trail you appear to have found?

OK, fine, thanks for enlightening me.----Ehrenkater (talk) 15:20, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Per this, I took the liberty of removing your request with a detailed edit comment. I hope that's okay. 97.102.205.224 (talk) 15:33, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the editing help. By the way, I've noticed that you really like bulleted lists, which is fine, but I've also noticed you seem to forget to add a line break after the list so that the following text is not made part of the last item. It's a minor problem and easily fixed, but you might want to avoid it to begin with. 97.102.205.224 (talk) 15:08, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Apologies for forgetting this, I usually remember.----Ehrenkater (talk) 15:20, 1 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Constrained?

The first sentence of Nuclear_clock#The_history_of_229mTh is odd. It reads "Since 1976, the 229Th nucleus has been known to possess a low energy excited state,[31] the excitation energy of which was constrained to be 10 eV in 1990.[32]". I don't believe that anyone has the power to affect the excitation energy. Maybe it means "assessed", or "estimated"? Maproom (talk) 07:19, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Maproom: That's standard physics MOS:JARGON for "we haven't found it, but we've ruled out..."; see Special:Search/observational constraint. Which, I've just noticed, is not listed at Constraint (disambiguation) and should be! It's already used a fair bit in in Wikipedia, e.g. in Age of the universe and Neutrino#Detectors near artificial neutrino sources, but you're right about the lay implication. Thank you for pointing out the problem! To ask someone not as steeped in technical literature, what does the qualifier "observational constraint" imply to you? 97.102.205.224 (talk) 14:45, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't aware of the phrase "observational constraint". I would have guessed it meant something like "we cannot observe the item at night"; but from what you say, it's like "our observations imply that it weighs less than 5g". (I studied physics at university from 1969 to 1971.) Maproom (talk) 15:10, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Maproom: I've fixed this article, but thanks for your insights on lay meaning. This is going to be tricky. Physicists and astronomers use "constraint" all the time to describe, basically "we looked, and didn't find, so therefore we've excluded the following possibilities...". See e.g. dark matter, axion or the references in weakly interacting massive particle (which I notice avoids the word in the article text).

I should mention that the "didn't find" part is not technically true; a constraint can be derived from any observation or non-observation. It just generally means a loose bound, and so is often derived from non-observations. 97.102.205.224 (talk) 18:45, 2 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Obviously"

@Cryolophosaur: Special:Diff/1230170525 cites WP:OFCOURSE when removing the word "obviously" from "Applications: When operational, a nuclear optical clock is expected to be applicable in various fields. ~~Obviously,~~ it may be used wherever today's atomic clocks are in operation, such as satellite-based navigation or data transfer. Its high precision would allow new applications inaccessible to other atomic clocks, such as relativistic geodesy, the search for topological dark matter, ..."

I'm wondering if this might be an exception to that general rule, or of there's some other way to phrase the idea. I'm trying to say "you could use it like any other atomic clock, but deep ultraviolet frequency combs are unlikely to be cost-effective unless you need the extra precision to measure..."

Alternatively, "the most trivial application is Yet Another Optical Frequency Standard, but the extra precision opens up new applications like..."

Or "In addition to everything atomic clocks are used for today, the nuclear clock's high precision would allow..."

The goal is to introduce the new applications of the extra timekeeping by saying "it's a perfectly good atomic clock, but I'm not seriously suggesting it'll displace existing technologies in applications where they're good enough." That's what the slight value judgement of "obviously" was trying to do. Kind of like "caviar, like all eggs, is a good source of protein, but you probably can't afford it."

My concern is that the reader will think it's WP:PUFFERY to baldly imply it's a useful general-purpose atomic clock, and the slight disapproval implied by the word "Obviously" actually returns the section to a WP:NPOV. Since that is the principle motivating WP:OFCOURSE, I wonder if an exception applies here.

Thank you for any thoughts you have on the subject. 97.102.205.224 (talk) 17:55, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Possible applications include... maybe? Remsense诉 17:56, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Remsense: Thank you for chiming in! I'd think that's already sufficiently covered by the section heading "Applications". The idea is to suggest that regular atomic clock applications will obviously be possible but not insult the reader's intelligence by suggesting that they're practical. It's all just a preface to the new possibilities opened up by increased precision. But if you happen to have a nuclear clock for some reason, it can certainly do all of the usual atomic clock things. 97.102.205.224 (talk) 18:57, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the sentence probably needs rephrased to better emphasize where it is realistically applicable — I just disagree that the word "obviously" does that. Having read your comment here, I understand what had been intended by it, but that wasn't apparent when I first read the article. I think we should try to find a way to rephrase the sentence that isn't unclear.

I think any of the alternatives you suggested would do that better than "obviously" did. Maybe something like "While it may be used wherever today's atomic clocks are currently in operation, its high precision would also allow new applications ..."? Cryolophosaur (talk) 22:59, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Cryolophosaur: Yes, having written this all this out in such detail, I think I can come up with some phrasing that starts "in addition to existing atomic clock applications such as satellite-based navigation or data transfer, its high precision would allow new applications inaccessible..." It's kind of rubber duck debugging, but I'll make it work.

Thank you for linking the rationale in the edit summary; that helped me organize my thoughts. 97.102.205.224 (talk) 02:21, 25 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Web search problem

Category

Ionization energy

Constrained?

"Obviously"