Gentle reader, hold on a zeptosec — a trillionth of a billionth of a second

Dear reader. Those of you with the attention span of a gnat, and stopped reading this editorial after the first two words of this sentence, here’s some good news. Last month, scientists measured the shortest unit of time: a zeptosecond — a trillionth of a billionth of a second, or .000000000000000000001 second.

With time on their hands, scientists came up with this formulation that may make instant noodles manufacturers nervous after they found out how long it took for a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule (H2): 240 zeptoseconds.

This dices up the earlier shortest measurement of time, a femtosecond — the now-languid millionth of a billionth second — into even tinier bits.


So how can it help you, impatient reader? Well, if you start measuring your time in incremental zeptoseconds, you may be liable to find more time, and stop whining about never finding the time to….

There may be a strong chance that with so much time at your disposal, you may again start to feel bored.

Which is when reading — an act that certainly requires more attention and time than, say, checking tweets or watching the news tickers on TV — could seem a worthwhile activity, the operative part of the word being ‘while’. Power naps may now seem like restful slumber, and deadlines no longer appear to be deathly.