National Physical Laboratory Open Day

Tuesday was, if you didn’t know, and shame on you if you didn’t, World Metrology Day.  And so I found myself parking outside the globally respected, centre of excellence in measurement and materials science, that is the National Physical Laboratory.

I really didn’t know what to expect, I knew of the labs of course, but I’ve been to research centres before, and apart from slightly chaotic rooms of unidentifiable equipment, and informational posters highlighting obscure corners of physics, they aren’t very informative, or day I say it, interesting.

I did wonder if it would be more of the same, lots of lab benches, lots of glass vessels, and lots of places you weren’t allowed in.

Not a bit of it.  This is one of the best science related days out I have ever had, and the five hours I was on site were nowhere near enough.  To give you some background, I have taken time off work in the past to look at powered down science infrastructure.  I’ve been to JET at Culham, which is another jewel in the British science crown, and the Diamond Light synchrotron at the Rutherford Appleton labs.  Both of these are mightily impressive, not just as experiments, but as imposing bit of infrastructure.  They left me inspired and excited by the possibilities they offer.  The NPL was more accessible, more human, more informative, and more incredible than anywhere I have been.

I spun rare earth magnets in their own induced magnetic field over a super conductor, made my own graphine and examined in under a microscope. The anechoic chamber made my ears feel funny as all external sound vanished, and I’m still wearing my cardboard diffraction glasses, which split the light from the bulbs in my house, so I can compare their spectrums.

In the fuel cell lab, by using a hand generator, I split water in to hydrogen and oxygen, which was stored inside the body of a model car.  The gas recombined inside a fuel cell on the car and an electric motor spun the wheels.  About twenty five percent of the energy from the hand crank ends up on the road.  More dramatically they had a lipstick sized cylinder that stored hydrogen gas as a metal hydride.  No pressurised canisters, and no risk of gas leaks.  It contains as much energy as the best battery technology, and can be recharged indefinitely.  One day we’ll all have them.

In the electron microscope lab, the researchers were using the focused ion beam scanning electron microscope to write children’s names in to a strand of hair, then printing out pictures of it.  The hair was very big and the names, very small.

Next door they were showing off their latest mass spectrometers, one of which fired a beam of argon 2000, which must surely be a band name, and the other worked in normal air without a vacuum chamber.  One of the researchers was putting visitor’s money under the probe tip.  One of my bank notes had cocaine on it, allowing me to maintain my rock image.

By putting my hand on top of an electro thermal generator, itself on top of a heat sink, I was able to move the needle on an ammeter, as my body heat setup a temperature gradient and produced a current.  In a brilliant piece of science theatre, two children were hammering, with soft glockenspiel hammers, faster and faster on two thick strips of piezoelectric material, trying to get the voltmeter to read the target number.  Cheers went up as they reached the desired figure, before they were pushed aside by the next two contestants, eager to reach, then beat the previous figure.

I saw the caesium fountain, a cloud of super cold caesium atoms, who’s oscillation between excited and ground state, provide the tick for the most accurate clock in the world, and the source of Coordinated Universal Time, the world’s prime time standard.  In the room above it, the equipment that converts the signal from seven atomic clocks into the time signal that is sends around the world.  One of the transmission methods is NTP (network time protocol) used by your PC to set its clock.  If you change the configuration of your PC to use ntp1.npl.co.uk, then your own computer will be synchronised with the world’s best clock.

A couple of doors down was the optical atomic clock, a single atom of strontium, in a vacuum, at a thousandth of a kelvin, interacting with a laser, and will in time replace caesium as the standard for how our species measures the second.

The kilogram was there of course.  That is the kilogram.  The object that defines the weight of every other object in the United Kingdom, a 3.9cm platinum-iridium cylinder stored under glass, behind more glass, and cleaned very occasionally with a hydrogen plasma beam.

I saw electronics that operate on a single electron; cooled almost to absolute zero, within powerful magnetic fields.  Had my retina scanned by a door lock, and watched an electro responsive fluid change the focal length of a mobile phone camera.

I spent several minutes in the presence of holograms so perfect that it took that long to realise the objects on display were not there at all.

I located plastic figures hidden in a jelly with a medical ultrasound.  Stared into the black depth of a five meter wide, former distillery mash tun that was now the underwater acoustic test tank.  Had the workings of a laser that pulses for less than a thousand billions of a second explained, and wore a holographic head up display that hands down beat anything Google glass can manage.

If you are interested in science, or if your children are interested in science, or if you are interested in science and wish your children were, then I cannot recommend this open day highly enough.  All of the staff were tremendous, happy to give explanations, and answer any questions.  The enthusiasm was clear to see, even though many of the researchers were helping out in parts of the lab they don’t normally work; their desire to promote the work of the NPL, and the wonderful world of science, was tangible.

They have held this open day for the past few years on the 20th of May, and it is free to attend.  Follow them on Twitter @NPL, and you'll hear about next years in time to register.

As the day ended we I exited past the shop where I could by the full set of sever SI unit mugs.  I didn’t buy them.  I already have all of them.