Wired 9.06: Atomic Rulers of the World

Atomic Rulers of the World Nanoscale optics, quantum computing - the battle for technology supremacy is being fought inside the labs of a national standards agency called NIST. And the new enemy is in the White House. Bill Phillips has taken the "close enough for government work" dodge and turned it upside down. He is sitting in a room that looks every bit like a civil-service cliché - bare walls and low-bid-contractor furniture inside a dull building in an equally dull town just outside the Washington Beltway - and explaining how he can tell time with a deviation of about one second every 20 million years. The feat helped win him the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. Phillips, like the other researchers gathered with us in this room, has bypassed the corporate and academic worlds to work here in the Gaithersburg, Maryland, headquarters of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, aka NIST. He has spent more than two decades as a physicist in this spot, and he's never really been tempted to leave. "The fact is," he says, gesturing to include his colleagues, "most of us are interested in learning how things work rather than in making money." That kind of commitment runs thick throughout NIST, which is split between two campuses - the main facility in Gaithersburg and a second in Boulder, Colorado. Celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year, the agency was originally named the National Bureau of Standards and charged with maintaining a measurement infrastructure that would determine the exact length of a meter, or how long a second really lasts, or how much power constitutes a volt. In other words, NIST would create yardsticks - at a time when there were at least eight different measurements for a gallon in the United States. A century later, NIST