Accurate Clocks May Disrupt Our Universe

So does that mean our current clocks aren’t accurate? They are, but there’s always room for more accuracy. Unfortunately, it comes at a price. According to scientists working on proving a relationship between time and entropy, the more accurate a clock runs, the more entropy it generates. Basically, we create more disorder to the universe as we increase the accuracy of our clocks: 

As we go forward in time, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system must increase. Known as the "arrow of time," entropy is one of the few quantities in physics that sets time to go in a particular direction — from the past, where entropy was low, to the future, where it will be high. 

This tendency for disorder to grow in the universe explains many things, such as why it’s easier to mix ingredients together than separate them out, or why headphone wires get so intricately tangled together in pants pockets. It’s also through this growing disorder that entropy is wedded so intimately to our sense of time. A famous scene in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" demonstrates how differently entropy makes one direction of time look to the other by playing World War II in reverse: Bullets are sucked from wounded men; fires are shrunk, gathered into bombs, stacked in neat rows, and separated into composite minerals; and the reversed arrow of time undoes the disorder and devastation of war.

This intimate connection between time and entropy has fascinated scientists for decades. Machines, such as clocks, also produce entropy in the form of heat dissipated to their surroundings. Physicists have been able to prove that a tiny quantum clock — a type of atomic clock that uses laser-cooled atoms that jump at highly regular intervals — creates more disorder the more accurately it measures time. But until now, it has been very difficult to prove that larger, more mechanically complex clocks create more entropy the more accurate they get, even if the idea sounds good in theory. 

Image via Live Science