Monday, September 13, 2004

MAKING IT SNAPPY

Physicists in Austria and Germany have used extreme ultra-violet rays to calculate the the time it takes for an electron to zoom around the nucleous of an atom. It takes about 15o attoseconds to circumnavigate the nucleous of a hydrogen atom. An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second, or 10 to the minus 18th. To put that in perspective, an electron could orbit the nucleous a million billion times in the time it takes to blink your eye. And that, my friends, is a lot of orbiting.

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