 First up tonight we have Lorcan Conlon from the Research School of Physics in the ANU College of Science, and the title of his three-minute thesis tonight is Measuring the Future. Try and measure the colour of any square on the screen. This is trivial for the larger squares, but becomes more difficult as you move down the screen. In order to explain why this is, I want you to think of the light travelling from the screen to your eyes as being made up of many many tiny bundles of light called photons. When you look at the large white square there are a huge number of photons reaching your eye and when you look at the large black square very few photons reach your eye making the two easy to distinguish. As you look at smaller squares there are fewer photons reaching your eye per square making it harder to decide the colour of that square. Now imagine taking this to its extreme. We keep making the squares smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually we reach the point where a square is made up of a single atom and things get weird. Measuring on an atomic scale is right at the heart of quantum physics and is critically important for developing future technologies which are rapidly approaching this scale. Unfortunately measuring at a quantum scale has its own unique challenges. For example there are roughly a billion trillion photons hitting you right now and you don't even notice. If these photons were to strike a single atom because the atom is so tiny the atom will move and so if we try and measure where a single atom is we actually move the atom and so it's not where we think it is. My work focuses on solving these problems. You might have heard about a device called a quantum computer in the news. Now they aren't perfect yet but the first generation of quantum computers are here. I have been given remote access to the world's best quantum computers. I have designed quantum algorithms which can solve the measurement problems we face. From my office here in Canberra I reprogrammed these quantum computers to implement my algorithms. With this I have been able to make measurements accurate on a scale 10 billion times smaller than a meter the size of a single atom. The improvements that my technique offers may at first appear minor but almost every measurement technique used nowadays was developed in a lab at some stage. It is only a matter of time before my technique is applied across a range of scientific fields. Being able to make more accurate measurements allows archaeologists to better date historical objects, allows biologists to better probe DNA and allows doctors to better investigate cancerous cells. An atom may seem small but my quantum enhanced measurement technique is the latest step to opening up a whole universe of understanding.