What’s the Shortest Amount of Time Ever Recorded?
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2021
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about how scientists just measured the quickest event ever recorded; how tiny remoras (suckerfish) stay stuck to fast-moving whales; and why being too busy could be killing your creativity.
Scientists have just measured the shortest amount of time, ever. by Cameron Duke
- Grundmann, S., Trabert, D., Fehre, K., Strenger, N., Pier, A., Kaiser, L., Kircher, M., Weller, M., Eckart, S., Schmidt, L. P. H., Trinter, F., Jahnke, T., Schöffler, M. S., & Dörner, R. (2020). Zeptosecond birth time delay in molecular photoionization. Science, 370(6514), 339–341. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb9318
- Mann, A. (2020, July 13). The universe’s clock might have bigger ticks than we imagine. Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/what-are-smallest-ticks-of-time.html
- Pappas, S. (2020, October 17). Meet the zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured. Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/zeptosecond-shortest-time-unit-measured.html
How do little remoras stay stuck to fast-moving whales? Physics! by Steffie Drucker
- Whale-surfing remoras ride cushion of water to stay in touch with their steeds. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/tcob-wrr102220.php
- Remora | fish | Britannica. (2020). In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/animal/remora
- Boundary Layer Separation and Pressure Drag – Aerospace Engineering Blog. (2016, October 15). Aerospace Engineering Blog. https://aerospaceengineeringblog.com/boundary-layer-separation-and-pressure-drag/
- r/explainlikeimfive - ELI5: How do bugs manage to stay stuck to car windows whilst travelling at high speed? Are the suckers super strong? (2011). Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/579sqf/eli5_how_do_bugs_manage_to_stay_stuck_to_car/
- Flammang, B. E., Marras, S., Anderson, E. J., Lehmkuhl, O., Mukherjee, A., Cade, D. E., Beckert, M., Nadler, J. H., Houzeaux, G., Vázquez, M., Amplo, H. E., Calambokidis, J., Friedlaender, A. S., Goldbogen, J. A. (2020). Remoras pick where they stick on blue whales. J, Exp. Biol. 223, jeb226654. https://jeb.biologists.org/content/223/20/jeb226654
Being Too Busy May Be Killing Your Creativity by Anna Todd
- A Genius Finds Inspiration in the Music of Another (Published 2006). (2020). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/science/a-genius-finds-inspiration-in-the-music-of-another.html
- The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness. (2019). Annual Reviews. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015331
- Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by Distraction. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117–1122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612446024
- Lee, C. S., Therriault, D. J., & Linderholm, T. (2012). On the Cognitive Benefits of Cultural Experience: Exploring the Relationship between Studying Abroad and Creative Thinking. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26(5), 768–778. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2857
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes, with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com. |
| 0:06.3 | I'm Cody Gough. |
| 0:07.3 | And I'm Ashley Hamer. |
| 0:08.5 | Today you learn about how scientists just measured the shortest amount of time ever, how tiny suckerfish stays stuck to |
| 0:16.1 | fast-moving whales, and why being too busy could be killing your creativity. |
| 0:21.6 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:24.0 | Recently, scientists measured the quickest event ever recorded, a particle of light traveling |
| 0:31.0 | from one side of a hydrogen molecule to the other. |
| 0:34.0 | And measuring an event that took the shortest amount of time ever has big implications for scientific research. |
| 0:41.0 | Now, this is impressive, but it's not unprecedented. We're always |
| 0:45.8 | getting better at measuring time. Like, everyone knows that you say one Mississippi |
| 0:50.7 | to count one second, at least in the US. I wonder what they do in other places. |
| 0:55.4 | And that's good enough for hide and seek, but if we're timing the Olympic 100 meter dash, |
| 1:00.3 | we'll need to be more precise. There we use stopwatches that can measure down to one hundredth of a second. |
| 1:07.0 | GPS needs even more precision. |
| 1:09.0 | It relies on atomic clocks that tick in even smaller slices of seconds. |
| 1:14.0 | But what if you're measuring the speed of light instead of Usain Bolt? |
| 1:19.0 | And what if that light is traveling 100 pikaameters instead of 100 meters. You'll need something better than a stopwatch or even an atomic clock. You'll need a particle detector. |
| 1:32.0 | Physicists at Gerte University in Germany |
| 1:35.0 | fired an x-ray at a molecule made of two hydrogen atoms. |
| 1:39.0 | Just as a refresher, a hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron apiece. A particle of light from the x-ray, |
| 1:47.1 | called a photon, hit one of the two hydrogen atoms and knocked its electron away like a billiard ball. Then it continued across to the second |
... |
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