how long is a moment?

Factual Questions
1

several years ago i was playing trivial pursuit and it asked me this question:

how long is a moment?

it confused me because i always thought there isn’t an actual time value to a moment. however, the answer was “a minute and a half.” i remember this distinctly because i meant to look it up and find out how they came up with that answer.

i don’t have the game anymore (and haven’t found the card with that question again). i’m pretty sure the version was a family edition with the yellow green (adult) and yellow box (kids) inside. the edition is before genus IV came out (some time in the late 90s).

anyone have a clue as to why the answer to the question of how long is a moment is a minute and a half? the closest reason i can think of is the etymology of moment, but haven’t found a dictionary or encyclopedia that says so. thanks!

2

Sure. It’s because the compilers of Trivial Pursuit sometimes made stuff up.

3

Sure. It’s because the compilers of Trivial Pursuit sometimes made stuff up.

4

:smack: you mean i’ve been racking my brain all these years because trivial pursuit decided to play a trick on me? damn them!!! :mad:

5

Rule of thumb. All Trivial Pursuit answers are crap.

6

I won’t dispute Trivial Pursuit answers are unreliable, but some answers are deliberate copyright traps. Just like most maps will have a few imaginary towns/streets.

7

I think it’s equal to ten shakes of a lamb’s tail.

8

Since a moment is perceptually ambiguous, perhaps you could say it is the length of a saccade (20-800 milliseconds)

Consider this from Zeki (2003)

At each saccade you receive more information with which to integrate and become phenomenally aware of. A new “moment” =)

9

How long is a piece of string?

10

Years ago I was taught that a moment is the briefest interval of time…that nothing is more brief.

11

Tempting as this is as an answer, that’s not it. In mediaeval reckoning, each hour was divided into four “points”, and each of those into ten “moments” – ie 1.5 minutes.

The OED has it as sense 2 in its entry for “moment”. Sense 1 agrees with OliverTwistofLime’s definition.

So it’s a real definition, but an obsolete one from an archaic system of time measurement.

12

It’s …

…

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…

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.

…

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… . . . . . . . that long.

13

It’s defined as the exact length of time it takes for 1 man to die, and 1[sup]1[/sup]/[sub]16[/sub] to be born.

14

A friend of mine here in Panama calls the shortest possible interval of time the panasecond, which is the time it takes between a traffic light turning green and the person behind you starting to honk his horn. Some postulate that the panasecond is actually negative, since the honking may start even before the light turns green. Time reversal in action!