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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 unit of 10 milliseconds may be called a centisecond, and one ...
50 microseconds – cycle time for highest human-audible tone (20 kHz). 50 microseconds – to read the access latency for a modern solid state drive which holds non-volatile computer data. [5] 100 microseconds (0.1 ms) – cycle time for frequency 10 kHz. 125 microseconds – common sampling interval for telephone audio (8000 samples/s). [6]
The TU (for time unit) is a unit of time defined as 1024 μs for use in engineering. The svedberg is a time unit used for sedimentation rates (usually of proteins). It is defined as 10 −13 seconds (100 fs). The galactic year, based on the rotation of the galaxy and usually measured in million years. [2]
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.
Such alternative units did not gain any notable acceptance. In China, during the Song dynasty, a day was divided into smaller units, called kè . One kè was usually defined as 1 ⁄ 100 of a day until 1628, though there were short periods before then where days had 96, 108 or 120 kè. [7] A kè is about 14.4 minutes, or 14 minutes 24 seconds.
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 ...
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 ...