A femtosecond is comparable to one second in 32 million years. It is like watching a 32-million-year movie to see one second.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Our femtosecond snapshots can examine a molecule at discrete instants in time.
We all know we have a prescribed amount of time on Earth. We just don't know how much.
Nanosecond precision matters for worldwide communications systems. It matters for navigation by Global Positioning System satellite signals: an error of a billionth of a second means an error of just about a foot, the distance light travels in that time.
I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even, and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years.
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
It takes these very simple-minded instructions - 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' - but executes them at a rate of, let's say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.
'Seconds' is very much about reaching out for the next thing after you've figured out the first thing.
One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.
A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.
Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.