Friday 11 September 2009

Time is a salami

It's quite juicy at times... but of course this refers to the way you can slice a salami nice and thinly into smaller and smaller sections, until you arrive at a point in time. It is like a video on a spool, which consists of a stream of pictures, taken in quick succession.Within any one foto, time would not exist. I wonder what the smallest unit of time is that one can measure.
  
One minute later, and Google has the answer. The smallest unit of time one can measure is 10 seconds to the power of minus 43, also known as Planck time. This is due to the wave length of photons which are used to measure very short time intervals as the speed of light is a constant you can refer back to. But this does not actually mean that a shorter period of time is inconceivable. It doesn't answer the question of how we proceed from one picture of the "time film" to the other (or from one slice of salami to the next). It boils down to the question whether time is continuous or discrete. Then again, Planck time fits into a second more than millions times billions times billions times billions times billions of times. So it really is pretty short. I wonder whether it is the time one can theoretically measure, or whether anyone has the capacity to actually measure such a short unit of time. I'll just enjoy the saucisson!

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