Thoughts About Time

I found an interesting article in the New York Times today about time. The author, Natalie Angier, in "Making Sense of Time, Earthbound and Otherwise," discusses the length and shortness of time in the universe. She notes that the time that we humans consider normal is really rather not normal for the universe as a whole. The earth has been around for about 4 billion years and the universe for 14 billion years.

In the subatomic world time is unimaginably short. An attosecond is a millionth of a trillionth of a second, the zeptosecond is a billionth of a trillionth of a second, and the yoctosecond is a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Angiers writes

Fleeting does not mean flaky or unstable, however. To the contrary: the fundamental quivers of the atom "are exceedingly regular," Dr. Jaffe [a theoretical physicist at M.I.T.] said, adding, "They mark the heartbeat of the universe." Atomic events are so reliable, so like clockwork in their behavior, that we have started tuning our macroscopic timepieces to their standards, and our beloved second, once defined as a fraction of a solar day, is now officially linked to oscillations in a cesium atom.

Articles like this always fill me with awe about the universe.