As this snapshot of Stephen Leone’s lab suggests, doing attosecond science is better suited for the technophilic among us. Credit: Courtesy of Stephen Leone
Just about anybody who played hide-and-seek as a kid remembers counting, with eyes (presumably) covered, in units of one-one-thousand. “One-one-thousand. Two-one-thousand. Three-one-thousand.” It’s one way to develop a feel for the duration of a second. If you live to be 80 years old, you will experience 2,522,880,000 seconds, not any one of which feels like a long time. When you think about time, it’s usually in many-second durations, like minutes, days and years. Unless you become a world-class athlete where differences measured in tenths, hundredths and maybe even thousandths of seconds can mean winning or losing Olympic gold, you might not think intervals shorter than a second are worth a second thought.
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