As a metronome keeps the tempo for a musician, a fundamental clock which holds the time of the entire Universe. Typically time is seen as a dimension, similar to spatial ones, but according to some theorists it could derive from a physical process, like a clock.

If the Universe possessed a fundamental clock this should tick more than one million billion billion times per second.

Second particle physics, the latter can obtain properties by interacting with fields: the particles acquire a mass by interacting with the Higgs field, carried by the homonymous boson. In the same way bodies could feel the passage of time in a similar way, interacting with an oscillating field, each oscillation would correspond to a tick of the clock.

Time is a difficult concept to handle in physics: for quantum mechanics, it is a background, an entity external to the particles we want to describe; for General Relativity it is a dimension comparable to the 3 spatial ones and whose flow can be altered by the presence of a gravitational field.

The problem of time is quite important, says Flaminia Giacomini, of the Perimeter Institute of Waterloo in Canada, about the possibility of unifying General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Studying the different mechanisms that can reproduce time, including the fundamental clock, can help the creation of new theories (for now, no time travel, however).

Theories are very important but need to be proven experimentally; scientists, therefore, speculated the effects of the fundamental clock on atomic clocks.

If the fundamental metronome is too slow, atomic clocks would quickly go out of sync and tick at irregular intervals. This does not happen, in fact, atomic clocks are the most precise method to measure the passage of time and, evidently, the eventual fundamental stopwatch must oscillate very quickly. How much?

Physicists suspect that there is a limit on the parts into which a second can be divided. Quantum mechanics prohibits divisions smaller than 10 to minus 43, the Planck scale. An interval equal to Plancks time seems reasonable for a possible fundamental clock.

To test their idea, researchers need to increase the oscillation frequency of current atomic clocks about 20 billion times. A considerable but not impossible increase, at least according to some scientists, and perhaps the Large Hadron Collider, the closest instrument to the Planck scale currently available, could help.

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The fundamental clock of the Universe is much faster than we imagined - InTallaght