Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old - some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far. Those kinds of numbers are always a little daunting. Ever since I was a boy in a public elementary school in Iowa, I've been learning to face the eons and eons that are embedded in the universe around us.

I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old.

The truth of these numbers has the same effect on me as watching the night sky in the high desert. It fills me with a sense of nonspecific immensity. I don't think I'm alone in this.

One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising because our own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.

How long does it take an electron to jump from one atom to another? According to a team of physicists in Germany and Spain, the answer is just 320 attoseconds. They came to this conclusion using X-ray pulses to watch an electron as it travelled from a sulphur atom to the surface of ruthenium metal. The process was one of the fastest ever studied (Nature 436 373).

Chemistry starts with the movement of electrons, a motion that takes place in a matter of attoseconds — a timescale almost too small to comprehend. An attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second, and there are more attoseconds in a minute than there have been minutes in the history of the universe.

With a flash of light to stimulate an electron and attosecond x-ray flashes to follow its activities, scientists could directly observe such phenomena as an atom becoming ionized, or the bonding of two or more atoms into molecules. Sound like a technology for the far-distant future? Not according to a pair of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Alexander Zholents and William Fawley, physicists at Berkeley Lab's Center for Beam Physics in the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division, have an idea for creating intense bursts of x-rays in pulse lengths of about 100 attoseconds. If you picture Niels Bohr's classic 1913 model of a hydrogen atom, it takes about 100 attoseconds for the electron to orbit the proton.

Lee et al (Science 1997 278:1098) report a study of the age and
origin of the Moon with the hafnium-tungsten chronometric method.
The tungsten isotopic compositions of 21 lunar samples were found
to range from chondritic to slightly radiogenic. The authors
suggest this heterogeneity is probably the result of late
radioactive decay within the Moon itself, and that the Moon
formed 4.52 to 4.50 billion years ago and its mantle has since
remained poorly mixed.

German-Austrian research team presents a method of measuring time in the region of a few hundred attoseconds, allowing the observation of atomic processes on this time scale

The electromagnetic field of visible light changes direction approximately one thousand trillion times per second, so that the intensity of the light field varies from zero to maximum faster than a femtosecond (1 femtosecond being one thousandth of a trillionth of a second). By precisely controlling these hyperfast oscillations in a short laser pulse scientists from the Vienna University of Technology and Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in conjunction with their colleagues from the University of Bielefeld succeeded in developing the first measuring apparatus: An "ultrafast stopwatch". This apparatus is capable of measuring the duration of atomic processes with an accuracy of less than 100 attoseconds (1 attosecond being one tousandth of a femtosecond). A 250?attosecond X-ray pulse initiates the atomic process to be measured and the attosecond stopwatch at the same time. This new measuring method now allows for the first time observation of ultrafast processes in the electron shell of atoms.

With the most modern microscopes scientists can observe atoms at rest. If, however, the atoms are in motion, very short light pulses are needed to reconstruct the motion from a series of snapshots. Whereas an exposure time of less than a thousandth of a second is sufficient for sharp imaging of a tennis-ball in flight, the light pulses have to be shortened by a billionth, to just a few femtoseconds, in order to record the fastest atomic motions in molecules. Inside the electron shell of excited atoms electrons fly a thousand times faster. They change from one energy state to another typically within 10 to a few 1000 attoseconds and in the process cause atoms originally bound in a molecule to fly apart or emit ultraviolet radiation or X-rays. These processes are of fundamental significance for controlling chemical reactions and synthesising new materials. They could even be applied for designing a versatile X-ray laser.

Chemists at the University of Toronto have captured atom-scale images of the melting process-revealing the first images of the transition of a solid into a liquid at the timescale of femtoseconds, or millionths of a billionth of a second.
The result is an unprecedented "movie" detailing the melting process as solid aluminum becomes a liquid.

Imagine that the history of the universe is compressed into one year—with the big bang occurring in the first seconds of New Year’s Day, and all our known history occurring in the final seconds before midnight on December 31. Using this scale of time, each month would equal a little over a billion years. Here’s a closer look at when important events would occur when we imagine the universe in one year.

Amid a fast game in a vast venue, sports photography seeks to freeze motion and isolate small portions of space for special consideration. In the scientific world of the ultrafast and ultrasmall, stroboscopic effects are achieved with greatly attenuated laser pulses. The advent of laser light served up in femtosecond (or 10^-15 second) bursts has helped to elucidate the molecular world by freezing their vibrational and rotational motions. Scientists would of course like to instigate and monitor even shorter times and distances.

A team from France and the Netherlands set a new speed record for subdividing the second, reporting last year that a laser strobe light had emitted pulses lasting 250 attoseconds--that's 250 billionths of a billionth of a second.
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