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The smallest meaningful increment of time is the Planck time―the time light takes to traverse the Planck distance, many decimal orders of magnitude smaller than a second. [ 1 ] The largest realized amount of time, based on known scientific data, is the age of the universe , about 13.8 billion years—the time since the Big Bang as measured in ...
A millisecond (from milli-and second; symbol: ms) is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to one thousandth (0.001 or 10 −3 or 1 / 1000) of a second [1] [2] or 1000 microseconds. A millisecond is to one second, as one second is to approximately 16.67 minutes.
A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or 1 ⁄ 1,000 of a millisecond. Because the next SI prefix is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10 −5 and 10 −4 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of microseconds.
millisecond: 10 −3 s: One thousandth of a second. Shortest time unit used on stopwatches. jiffy (electronics) ~ 10 −3 s: Used to measure the time between alternating power cycles. Also a casual term for a short period of time. centisecond: 10 −2 s: One hundredth of a second. decisecond: 10 −1 s: One tenth of a second. second: 1 s: SI ...
The word "minute" comes from the Latin pars minuta prima, meaning "first small part", and "second" from pars minuta secunda or "second small part". Angular measure also uses sexagesimal units; there, it is the degree that is subdivided into minutes and seconds, while in time, it is the hour.
It is also the standard single-unit time representation in many programming languages, most notably C, and part of UNIX/POSIX standards used by Linux, Mac OS X, etc.; to convert fractional days to fractional seconds, multiply the number by 86400. Fractional seconds are represented as milliseconds (ms), microseconds (μs) or nanoseconds (ns ...
The measurement of time is unique in SI in that while the second is the base unit, and measurements of time smaller than a second use prefixed units smaller than a second (e.g. microsecond, nanosecond, etc.), measurements larger than a second instead use traditional divisions, including the sexagesimal-based minute and hour as well as the less ...
SI prefixes are frequently combined with the word second to denote subdivisions of the second: milliseconds (thousandths), microseconds (millionths), nanoseconds (billionths), and sometimes smaller units of a second. Multiples of seconds are usually counted in hours and minutes.