Delve into the fascinating and delicate realm of timekeeping. Discover how atomic clocks have replaced the Earth as our time reference and how the present and future challenges in measuring and delivering time are met by the home of UK time, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).

00:00 Intro to time measurement
3:14 How timekeeping was standardised
8:37 The atomic clock revolution
12:11 How is time now measured with UTC?
19:02 Why is accurate time needed by the finance sector?
21:07 Accurate time stamps prevent stock market crashes
28:03 How NPL supports the financial sector
33:11 Why time is a hidden utility for GPS
37:26 The risks of position, navigation and timing dependency
40:37 The future of the time scale
43:57 A nationwide timing infrastructure
46:43 Optical atomic clocks for the future
48:04 How do atomic clocks work?
55:05 The extreme accuracy of optical clocks
1:01:19 Redefining what a second is

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This lecture was recorded at the Ri on 26 October 2023.

We kick off with Peter Whibberley, a senior scientist with many years experience exploring the world of timekeeping. Peter takes us on a brief journey through the history of time, explaining how the national time scale is created today, and how it is a key part of the global collaboration that creates the precise time and frequency measurement on which life and business relies today.

Resilient time signal dissemination from the national time scale is crucial to NPL's mission, ensuring traceable timestamping and time synchronisation across industries, enhancing market clarity in the financial sector, and enabling regulatory forensics in the event of a crash. Elena Parsons will share valuable insights into how NPL spearheads the delivery of resilient time signals, granting industry access through innovation and service nodes. Gain a deeper understanding of the vital role played by NPL in maintaining accurate and reliable timekeeping.

Looking to the near future, Leon Lobo, a visionary in the field, shed slight on what lies ahead for the world of timekeeping. Exploring the strategies and innovations aimed at futureproofing resilient time, mitigating our overreliance on weak and vulnerable signals from spacebased global navigation satellite systems such as GPS. Learn about the leadingedge initiatives spearheaded by NPL to ensure timekeeping remains robust and adaptable in an everchanging world.

Lastly, looking even further ahead at developments in precision timekeeping, we close the lecture with Rachel Godun, a principal scientist in the field, who unveils NPL's research programme into nextgeneration optical atomic clocks. Discover how these clocks will improve the performance of future time scales and are so accurate that they will even be used to redefine the unit of time itself.

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