Excerpt from Half-Lives

She laughed now, the tension broken as if it were never there. "Why are we pointing this thing at that box of smoke to begin with?" Jill asked.
"You know about cesium beam clocks?"
"Oh, wow - is this one?"
"Almost. There is a cesium atom in there, and we're going to measure it constantly. We won't count the vibrations, though, not for the sake of time. We are measuring its vibrations so we know it's still cesium."
"Is it entangled?" she asked.
"Good job, yes, yes it is. What leads you to that conclusion?"
"Could it decay if it were entangled with another atom that decayed? If you had entangled a subatomic particle, say a quark, with one of the quarks in the cesium atom, if it changed some characteristic then the other would change to match, the hadron would change in some way, the atom would lose one neutron or positron. Then it would no longer be cesium, would vibrate at a different rate."
"Brilliant," Raul said.
"Just one problem: how do you entangle quarks?"
"Not published yet. Probably not ever. This is a secret, a great secret. When this is all up and running, it will get more complicated. A lot more complicated. The last thing we need to do is irradiate a cat."
"Tell me," she said.
"I will. Just as soon as I figure it all out. For now, let's get this laser calibrated."
Jill picked up the little screwdriver again, wondering at how much it was like the one she used to fix her glasses when the screw worked its way out of the hinge that held the arm to the frame. Such a mundane item to be part of so weird an experiment.
"Wait a second," she said suddenly. "If it isn't going to be published, what's the point of it? What happened to publish or perish?"
"There's more to life," Raul said, "than trying not to perish."