What is the longest Unit of time measurement? What is the shortest?
The shortest that makes any sense is the Planck time. The longest would be the age of the Universe.
I read somewhere (I know, the ubiquitous “somewhere”) - I think it was in Scientific American on reflection - that current thinking, or maybe research, is indicating that time may not be quantized after all, instead flowing continuously - anyone heard about this?
The best cite I could find was this - they are sitting firmly on the fence.
The longest conceival measure of time - QED - did you mean the age of the universe up till now, or the total age of the universe, from Big Bang to - what? - proton decay? Heat death? One thing seems certain - the road ahead stretches way further than the road behind us.
Did someone here say that time is quantized?
Also, I think the OP was asking about a unit of time that has a name, not just the longest span of time that we can imagine. There’s a millennium, that’s the longest that I can think of offhand. But that’s just a prefix meaning “thousand” added to a word that means “year.” If we allow that, then we could go “yottaennium” to denote 10^21 years, but I don’t think that’s fair. The logest fundamental unit I can think of is “year.”
IIRC there are some words in Hindu theology for enormously long time spans.
My Websters says an eon/aeon is an unmeasurably or unimaginably long time or a billion years, take your pick.
nanoseconds
microseconds
milliseconds
seconds
minutes
hours
days
weeks
fortnight
months
years
decades
centuries
millenia
aeons
One aeon = 1.0 × 10^-14 nanoseconds =)
The definition of infinity might suit the purpose as the longest measure of time.
there is a measure used by astronomers called a “jiffy”
its the smallest fraction of a second ever considered to be relevant in science–a decimal point followed by 43 zeros and a 1.
try saying “one to the minus 43rd of a second”-it’s easier to say “a jiffy”.
It is (I think) the amount of time it took the Big Bang to create the basic quantum particles that later coagulated into the protons and electrons. (Something like that, anyway. I ain’t no quantum physicist).
(Actually,–I dont know how you define “unit”–but I’m not sure that it could be called a “unit” of time, because it is only used for one purpose-defining that one aspect of the Big Bang theory. I dont think scientists measure other events in jiffy’s.)
The Planck time (which now uses Dirac’s constant instead of Planck’s constant as a base) is roughly ~10E-43 seconds and was one of the Planck or natural units which were created in order to try and get rid of the arbitariness of units. It’s also the distance that quantum gravity is thought to take over from classical general relativity.
The Planck era was the first 10E-43 seconds of the universe, which cannot be described without a theory of QG.
Time’s not quantitized as far as is known, that the Planck time is the shortest meaningful measurement of time currently is not the same as saying that time is quantitized.
The number of years in the Jain unit of time known as a shirsha prahelika is on the order of 10[sup]207[/sup]. In contrast, the approximate age of the universe in Planck time units (smaller than a year by many orders of magnitude) is on the order of 10[sup]60[/sup].
Longest = an afternoon at my mother’s house.
Shortest = the period leading up to that.
I have always used the excuse of, unlike other humans, living in non-linear time, for my chronic tardiness. Are you now telling everyone else is moving here too!? I just can’t have it… I knew I shouldn’t have followed that rabbit!.
I once heard on a game show (Jeopardy I think) that the shortest unit of time is a moment. Of course that’s not quantifiable, but if it’s on a game show it has to be right!
You forgot pico, femto, atto, etc.
Eh? Think you mistyped. 1.0 x 10[sup]-14[/sup] nanoseconds is a really tiny length of time–1.0 x 10[sup]-24[/sup] seconds, or almost double the Planck time. On the other hand if you meant 1.0 x 10[sup]14[/sup] ns, that’s only 100,000 seconds or about 27.7 hours.
10E-24 is not almost double the Planck time it’s just under a trillion mutiplied by a trillion mutplied by a million times bigger!!!
Oops now I’ve made a mistake it’s ~10 trillion trillion times bigger
Yeah, I realized that after I’d posted. I was looking at the exponents when I said that, obviously.
an easy mistake to make