Question: How will your work effect the future of our species and world?

Kathryn Burrows answered on 18 Jun 2018:

Great question! Obviously the answer is that is it hard to tell! As we all live in a highly complex interconnected system.

My aim/goal is obviously to try to have a positive impact. My current work is a tiny part of something grand. Our species and our society is very interconnected, it works on things like trade between individual human beings, companies, whole countries. Fair trade relies on our ability to measure things, for example, to check that 1 kg of rice in England is the same as 1 kg of rice in Spain. This is the science of measurements, based around definition of measurement units of which there are seven base units. NPL is the government lab that specialises in measurement. We hold the UK master copies of standard measurements and many experts in measuring things very precisely work here.

My group is the time and frequency group. We create the time for the whole country, the time is what we say it is! We do this by having lots of clocks and comparing them. Comparing clocks is important as with only one clock you do not know whether it is running on time, you can only tell this by comparing with a more accurate clock. The measurement unit of time is the second and here at NPL we have the Caesium fountain clock which is the nations most accurate clock. I work on helping the group which runs and maintains the Cs fountain clock, as well as on the ACES mission, which would allow clock comparisons between France, Germany, Japan and America to a greater accuracy than is currently available with existing satellite based techniques.