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National Physical Laboratory Stages Unique On-Line Experiments

May 18, 2001

Does your computer’s clock always run slow?
How good are human beings at estimating?
How much does gravity vary over the globe?
With your help we are attempting to find answers to these questions as part of a huge on-line Web event to celebrate World Metrology Day 2001, Sunday 20th May. This is the first time NPL have attempted such a global experiment and we need you to help us make it a success, whether you have any scientific training or not.
The Web address to join in is:

www.npl.co.uk/wmd

The more participants we have, the more accurate the answers will be for the following three experiments, all based on the notion of measurement:

·       A simple experiment that gathers the time from the PC clock of the person taking part and analyses the difference from the NPL atomic clock. The results will show the variation of a large group of users’ clocks from the NPL atomic clock; this kind of experiment has never been done before.

·       We estimate every time we make a manual measurement, but how accurate are we and can we develop our estimation? This experiment investigates this and will determine if there is an unconscious bias in measurement.

·       We are all aware of the effects of gravity, just   think of Newton and his apple! This experiment will measure the local gravity field using the classic pendulum experiment. This is the most challenging experiment, but if it can be done carefully enough then the small variation of the gravity field with latitude may be apparent.

Do not worry if you miss out on Sunday 20th May as the Website will remain open until Sunday 8th July after which the experiment will finally close. The results will be published at the same link on the NPL Website from Wednesday 11th July.
Happy experimenting and many thanks for your help!

National Physical Laboratory (NPL)