The British government is to pour £180 million into ensuring the UK keeps up with the times.
Don't worry, it's not another cringeworthy effort to get down with the kids by putting Keir Starmer on TikTok. Rather, DSIT is funneling the cash toward the National Physical Laboratory's (NPL) National Timing Centre (NTC) to continue building out "the UK's first nationally distributed timing infrastructure."
That in turn will ensure "an assured and trusted timekeeping source" to underpin the rollout of new technologies that require "precise and synchronized time."
These include the likes of 5G/6G applications, smart cities, and connected autonomous vehicles, according to a statement on the investment.
Keeping those uncrewed buses running on time will be an atomic clock network deployed across the UK "to create a resilient time source that is kept accurate using state-of-the-art cesium clocks; so accurate that it would take 160 million years for them to drift by just one second."
Losing track of time via "an outage of satellite-based positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services" could cost the UK more than £1.4 billion in just 24 hours, the NPL reckons. Of course, a stray leaf or errant goose has similar potential to cause chaos across the UK's transport system.
The statement adds: "This resilient time source will become our national time scale, UTC (NPL)."
The signals will be shared over fiber and satellites from two dedicated sites, "providing the UK with terrestrial time to complement satellite timing signals."
The NTC will also invest in "both the UK supply chain for essential timing components, and the vital timing skills the NTC needs." Presumably we're talking more than the ability to say: "Well, the big hand's pointing at…"
It's not just the NPL that is working on its timing. MIT boffins have recently developed a technique to tune out quantum noise, making atomic clocks – typically based on the vibrations of cesium atoms – even more accurate.
Though some physicists reckon atomic is not enough – we need to go full nuclear, rather than messing around with the whole atom, with thorium and strontium timepieces under consideration.
As for what your average atomic clock actually looks like? Well, you could do worse than look at the setup at Jodrell Bank, as detailed in our Geek's Guide to the venerable observatory. OK, that was 13 years ago now, but let's face it, time is kind of relative. ®
Source: The register