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Smallest unit of time?

That would depend on whether time is quantized or not, and nobody knows either way. As far as I'm aware, there's no experimental evidence for any quantization of time. Theoretically it's certainly possible, but to answer the question definitively would require a complete theory of quantum gravity, which nobody has.

But if it was quantized, the smallest unit of time would be expected to be the Planck time, which is 10<sup>-43 </sup> seconds.
 
Brian the Snail said:
That would depend on whether time is quantized or not, and nobody knows either way. As far as I'm aware, there's no experimental evidence for any quantization of time. Theoretically it's certainly possible, but to answer the question definitively would require a complete theory of quantum gravity, which nobody has.

But if it was quantized, the smallest unit of time would be expected to be the Planck time, which is 10<sup>-43 </sup> seconds.
Click to expand...

This is the smallest quantified measure of time. Apparently beyond this, it is both time and space (or something like that. Hmm, where are the physicists around here...)

Athon
 
A rare post from me!

From a quick search, this is the clock with the 'fastest' tick I have heard of.


World's Most Precise Clock


Writing in the journal Science, Diddams and colleagues say their new clock is based on the optical frequency of a single cooled mercury ion (a mercury atom with one electron stripped off) linked to a laser oscillator - which acts rather like a traditional pendulum to produce the clock's "ticks".

Except, this clock is producing 1.064 quadrillion ticks per second - so many that a high-speed laser and an optical fibre link are then required to count them and so mark time.
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I hope this helps!
 
Zep said:
A squidgin.
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Is that what it's called? I was wondering what you called the interval between the time that I fall asleep and the time that #$%^ing cat climbs up on the bed and walks across my back.
 
Re: A rare post from me!

Uncertainty said:
From a quick search, this is the clock with the 'fastest' tick I have heard of.


World's Most Precise Clock

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Writing in the journal Science, Diddams and colleagues say their new clock is based on the optical frequency of a single cooled mercury ion (a mercury atom with one electron stripped off) linked to a laser oscillator - which acts rather like a traditional pendulum to produce the clock's "ticks".

Except, this clock is producing 1.064 quadrillion ticks per second - so many that a high-speed laser and an optical fibre link are then required to count them and so mark time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


I hope this helps!
Click to expand...

This computes to approx 9.4 x 10<sup>-16</sup> seconds...
 
The Planck scale can be thought of as an estimate of the shortest possible measurable interval of time, because measuring time is a physical process, and you need high energy densities for fast physical processes and there's a limit to how high you can make your energy density before you get a black hole. But that doesn't mean time is actually quantized, and last I heard it looked like it wasn't.
 
Is not time an artificial notion that is used to discuss physical change and therefore the shortest unit of time would be the fastest process...

I go for the nanosquidgin...
 
Dancing David said:
Is not time an artificial notion that is used to discuss physical change and therefore the shortest unit of time would be the fastest process...
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I hope you realize the irony in that statement. But no, time is not an artificial notion at all. It is perhaps an incompletely understood notion, but it is far from artificial.
 
Re: Re: A rare post from me!

Diogenes said:


This computes to approx 9.4 x 10<sup>-16</sup> seconds...
Click to expand...

Actually we can currently do about an order of magnitude better than this...

One of the most interesting lab tours I have ever done was around some labs in which they build these "most accurate" clocks.

To put in perspective how good this is - they can measure relativistic time dilation at walking speed (c<sup>2</sup> is about 10<sup>17</sup>). They can measure gravitaitonal time dilation corresponding to about a 1 metre change in altitude on earth....
 
An "Mmm-Bop".

The legendary power-rock trio band "Hanson" wrote a great great song about it. An Mmm-Bop is the shortest moment possible, alternatively an unrepeatable moment.


Mmm-Bop.
 
BPSCG said:
I was wondering what you called the interval between the time that I fall asleep and the time that #$%^ing cat climbs up on the bed and walks across my back.
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A Paws, of course.
 
Ziggurat said:


I hope you realize the irony in that statement. But no, time is not an artificial notion at all. It is perhaps an incompletely understood notion, but it is far from artificial.
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Well, I didn't intend to be ironic, but I thought that time was merely a vehicle for measuring change, so I assume that it is process based, ie: the propagation of wavelengths, the decay of a particle, the ineraction of particles and photons. So I assumed, icorrectly that t9ime was based on measuring changes and an artifact of observation. Please educate me.
 
Dancing David said:

Well, I didn't intend to be ironic, but I thought that time was merely a vehicle for measuring change, so I assume that it is process based, ie: the propagation of wavelengths, the decay of a particle, the ineraction of particles and photons. So I assumed, icorrectly that t9ime was based on measuring changes and an artifact of observation. Please educate me.
Click to expand...

By ironic I meant that it was ironic to say that time was ONLY a measure of how fast something happens, since that's really a self-referential definition (what do you mean by how fast something happens? How much time passes while it's happening!).

Measurements of time are necessarily process-based, of course, but leaving the definition at that is really quite inadequate. Time is as real as space is. It's a geometric feature of the universe, you can't get space independent of time, or vice versa. Time is certainly not the SAME as space, but it's just as real. I suppose you could say neither is real, it's all just a conceptual tool for explaining how objects relate to each other, but I think that's not really a useful idea, that's just a semantic game.
 
For the record

For the record:

"The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Cesium-133 atom."

Any other measure is just an aproximation (untill the second is redefined)
 
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