Got a Minute?

Dr. Atom's Tiny Classroom!

Flock, I’d imagine that you’re pretty smart. The three of you that are here, I mean, on anything resembling a regular basis. The rest of you are what I’d call “eggressive” (it’s a mix of “egghead” and “regressive”) meanin’ as how’s you ain’t TOO smart fer us fellers but you spends yer time doin’ SMART things, y’know, that the rest of us smart people ain’t got no time and no account fer.

Just kidding. Mike.

So you know what big is. Everybody knows that big is, well, impossibly big. Unbelievably big. Inconceivably big. Like, so big that it goes on for miles and miles and astronomical units (AUs), that Star Trek word that they love so much, “parsecs,” oh, and don’t forget “quadrants” (which are actually just a quarter of something, but I digress knowledgably) and so on until that ugly word that no one understands, not even your house-cleaner-who’s-secretly-Russell-Crowe-the-tortured-genius: “Infinity.”

Can’t quite wrap your pencil-shaped head around that concept, can ya?

Nope. Can’t tell me what “infinity” is. 

How about small, though? Well, even I have an idea of what the fermions (and don’t sweat the fermions!) are all about. They’re reeeeeeeelly small, smaller than even George Bush’s single brain cell (called a neuron). (It means that if he ever starts drinking again he’d immediately have permanent Alzheimer’s). 

But anyway, there’s an end to smallness — they think. Anything smaller than a neutrino had better start singing the blues, cause ain’t nobody going to be finding YOUR ass for another half-million years.

But what about time . . . yes, time. I know you think you know what time is. A second is a short time. Eternity is a long time. (It’s also my nickname for Brigitte’s favorite soap opera, The Old and the Toothless.)

But anything faster than a second is pretty fast, right? Well, that’s fast, but light goes 186,000 miles in that instant — that’s more than halfway to the moon.

But what about a femtosecond? Or an attosecond? Well, the former is about the time it takes a hair to grow one atom. And your hair grows billions of atoms at a time. In fact, it grows a nanometer in the time you take to lift the scissors to cut it. Well, in comparison to that time, a femtosecond would be about a billion years. 

An attosecond? An attoscecond is about the time it takes an electron to fly halfway around the nucleus of an atom. How do we know this? Because an atom walked into a bar and said to the bartender “I think I just lost an electron.” And the bartender said “Are you sure?” And the atom said “I’m positive!”