How did this collaboration with National Physical Laboratory
come about for your project The Fundamental Units? For six
months I was having tests run all around the UK on different
types of microscopes such as scanning electron microscopes, at
different institutions, universities and testing laboratories.
The Curator of Modern Money at the British Museum suggested an
idea which eventually lead me to the National Physical
Laboratory. I ended up at the Advanced Engineered Materials
Group which is part of the National Physical Laboratory, using
an Alicona infinite focus 3D optical microscope. They were
really into experimenting and pushing the equipment. It took
about a month of tests to get the results we see. The process
involved Petra the scientist in charge of the machine writing
programs to capture the data as a whole, as the machine is
designed for looking in detail at one tiny part of an object. We
crashed it several times working out the right solution. Each
coin, which are generally around 18-20mm in di