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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.
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 base unit is a unit adopted for expressing a base quantity. A derived unit is used for expressing any other quantity, and is a product of powers of base units. For example, in the modern metric system, length has the unit metre and time has the unit second, and speed has the derived unit metre per second.
The base unit in the International System of Units (SI) is the meter, defined as "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1 ⁄ 299792458 seconds." [ 9 ] It is approximately equal to 1.0936 yd .
The terametre (SI symbol: Tm) is a unit of length in the metric system equal to 1 000 000 000 000 meters (10 12 m). To help compare different distances , this section lists lengths starting at 10 12 m (1 Tm or 1 billion km or 6.7 astronomical units ).
Metric time is the measure of time intervals using the metric system. The modern SI system defines the second as the base unit of time, and forms multiples and submultiples with metric prefixes such as kiloseconds and milliseconds. Other units of time – minute, hour, and day – are accepted for use with SI, but are not part of it
The concept of defining a unit of length in terms of a time received some comment. [136] In both cases, the practical issue is that time can be measured more accurately than length (one part in 10 13 for a second using a caesium clock as opposed to four parts in 10 9 for the metre in 1983).
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 ...