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Clock time and calendar time have duodecimal or sexagesimal orders of magnitude rather than decimal, e.g., a year is 12 months, and a minute is 60 seconds. 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]
A unit of time is any particular time interval, used as a standard way of measuring or expressing duration. The base unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), and by extension most of the Western world , is the second , defined as about 9 billion oscillations of the caesium atom.
A unit of 10 milliseconds may be called a centisecond, and one of 100 milliseconds a decisecond, but these names are rarely used. [3] To help compare orders of magnitude of different times, this page lists times between 10 −3 seconds and 10 0 seconds (1 millisecond and one second). See also times of other orders of magnitude.
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 ...
He proposed in 1926 a unit of time called the "jiffy" which was equal to the time it takes light to travel one centimeter in vacuum (approximately 33.3564 picoseconds). [5] It has since been redefined for different measurements depending on the field of study. [6]
This category identifies units of time, either general (in Chronology) or for specific scientific and other uses; and some closely related notions. The main article for this category is Unit of time .
The prefix symbols are always prepended to the symbol for the unit without any intervening space or punctuation. [9] This distinguishes a prefixed unit symbol from the product of unit symbols, for which a space or mid-height dot as separator is required. So, for instance, while 'ms' means millisecond, 'm s' or 'm·s' means metre-second.
A nanosecond (ns) is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one billionth of a second, that is, 1 / 1 000 000 000 of a second, or 10 −9 seconds. The term combines the SI prefix nano-indicating a 1 billionth submultiple of an SI unit (e.g. nanogram, nanometre, etc.) and second, the primary unit of time in the SI.