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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]
One nonillionth of a second. rontosecond: 10 −27 s: One octillionth of a second. yoctosecond: 10 −24 s: One septillionth of a second. jiffy (physics) 3 × 10 −24 s: The amount of time light takes to travel one fermi (about the size of a nucleon) in a vacuum. zeptosecond: 10 −21 s: One sextillionth of a second.
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.
1.67 minutes (or 1 minute 40 seconds) 10 3: kilosecond: 1 000: 16.7 minutes (or 16 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 6: megasecond: 1 000 000: 11.6 days (or 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 9: gigasecond: 1 000 000 000: 31.7 years (or 31 years, 252 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds, assuming that there are 7 leap years in the interval)
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 ...
Ephemeris Time was from 1952 to 1976 an official time scale standard of the International Astronomical Union; it was a dynamical time scale based on the orbital motion of the Earth around the Sun, from which the ephemeris second was derived as a defined fraction of the tropical year. This ephemeris second was the standard for the SI second from ...
International Atomic Time (TAI), in which every day is precisely 86 400 seconds long, ignores solar time and gradually loses synchronization with the Earth's rotation at a rate of roughly one second per year. In Unix time, every day contains exactly 86 400 seconds. Each leap second uses the timestamp of a second that immediately precedes or ...
Many computer systems measure time and date using Unix time, an international standard for digital timekeeping. Unix time is defined as the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 (an arbitrarily chosen time based on the creation of the first Unix system), which has been dubbed the Unix epoch. [6]