A clock that can detect tiny shifts in the flow of time itself

Re:A clock that can detect tiny shifts in the flow of time i... by Animats on Monday November 03, 2014 @04:37PM (#8553686)

Both special and general relativity effects are well known to affect clocks. This is a major headache for GPS satellites, which have atomic clocks that gain about 38 microseconds a day vs earth-based clocks from the combination of speed and gravity difference.

38us/day slip is huge. That's 6 miles of GPS positional error. So GPS was designed with an correction and adjustment scheme to deal with this. So it's been a practical problem for decades.

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Re:A clock that can detect tiny shifts in the flow of time i... by ithkuil on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @02:06AM (#8555430)

As far as I know there is no headache, and although the theory is non intuitive, it just works as expected. The physics behind it can get complicated at the fundamental level, but computing a time dilation for an orbit is hardly rocket science. You don't even have to compute it, you can actually measure it right?

Do you know about any specific painful effect that was revealed only after general relativity was tried to be applied to GPS satellites in particular?

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