Physics
A fundamental trade-off between the resolution of a clock and its accuracy could have important implications for quantum computers, which must measure short timescales accurately
Quantum computers need to measure small units of time very accurately
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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…
