Over the years that I’ve been writing this blog, the subject has been “time” on a number of occasions. From daylight saving “time” to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) which is now referred to as UTC (Universal Time Coordinated.) Various times have fascinated me and with the advanced technologies and space travels, time, particularly accurate time, is more important than ever.
One of the fundamental mysteries surrounding the concept of time is whether it’s continuous and our chronological measurements are just a way of making sense of it, or if it actually breaks down into discrete “ticks” that are very tiny.
So time is an abstract concept at best, but the dimensions for measuring time are so tiny that the classical laws of physics don’t really count. The smallest viable measurement of time is derived from a unit of distance called the Planck length. That’s where dimensions become so small that the classical laws of physics break down and quantum effects kick in. That point is about 1.6 x 10-35m. From that point, physicists speak of the smallest theoretical period of time as being the interval required for a photon traveling at the speed of light to cover the Planck length, or just 0.5 x 10-43 seconds.
Recently, scientists at Goethe University in Germany actually measured the world’s smallest unit of time and its called a zeptosecond. The scientists measured how long it takes for a photon to cross a hydrogen molecule — around 247 zeptoseconds — making that measurement the shortest time span ever successfully recorded. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billion of a second. In case you’re interested, that’s a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1 — it looks like this: 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 001
A yocotosecond is a septillionth of a second — but has not been measured and recorded.
If you’re interested in why anyone even cares, scientists hope the information will be helpful in quantum computing and superconductivity.
Also, in case you’re interested, the best atomic clocks can measure down to a tenth of a billionth of a billionth of a second (ten to the 19th power.)
When I say something didn’t take very long, I always use “nanosecond” — I never knew that was such a long period of time.
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