The Elusive Present

You are not in the present. This sounds like the admonition of a cranky guru, but it is – literally – true. The present always escapes us because we aren’t quick enough to grasp it. It’s like a tiny ball of mercury always rolling away from us just out of our reach. That is because our senses aren’t designed to apprehend reality at the precise instant that reality (however defined) actually happens. For instance, when you look at an object or someone’s face you are seeing that object or that face in the past. Admittedly, it’s not very far back in the past – a fraction of a second, but all the same what you are registering in your brain is not what is happening exactly now. (The light transmitting the image has to travel a distance to reach your retinas, after all, and then the brain has to process the information – and that takes time.) So what is now exactly? And how can it be measured? Or can it be? Well, it turns out, that there is another, more obscure measurement of time called the attosecond.  One hundred attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years, which should give you some idea about just how thinly sliced you can carve up a second. While light can zoom around the world seven and a half times in a single second, light can barely make it from one end of a molecule to another in a single attosecond. Scientists can’t even measure a single attosecond; the shortest interval of time that it is possible to measure is12 attoseconds. But if you were capable of perceiving life in attoseconds you wouldn’t be able to watch a movie or a TV show because it would appear to you as a series of still frames. It would be like watching a lugubriously slow slide show – not very entertaining. But we would be able to see a flash of light exactly when it occurred; we would be able, finally, to be here in the now – exactly now – but think of how bored and impatient we would be waiting for everyone – and everything – else to catch up. 

Seconds

Two items in the news recently caused me to think about seconds – that is the interval of time to which we usually give so little thought. The first was the announcement that scientists have succeeded in coming up with an even more precise way of demarcating the second than the one that is being currently used. I’d bet that you were perfectly satisfied the way things stand -- or move – with the second, and didn’t think that it was necessary to find a new way of determining its passage. Some of you may recall that the second has been calculated according to an atomic clock, specifically the frequency of the vibration of extremely cold cesium atoms. Once these frigid atoms are blasted with microwaves they vibrate at a frequency of 9,192,631,770 Hz – and that translates to a single second. But apparently that isn’t good enough for scientists. Now they are developing new optical atomic clocks using laser light (which because it has a much higher frequency is 100 times more precise). The new optical lattice clock, as it’s known, will be three times more accurate than an atomic clock that’s based on laggard cesium atoms, so accurate that it will lose only one second every 300 million years. This isn’t a theoretical matter since technology like GPS depends on the accuracy of the clock; an error of one nanosecond, or a billionth of a second, would mean the location pinpointed by the GPS is about 12 inches (30 centimeters) off. Figuring out where you’re supposed to be isn’t the only thing that is contingent on making sure that those seconds are accurately calculated. There’s a lot of money to be made – or lost – in the blink of an eye or tick and tock of a clock, too. Which brings me to the second item. A couple of weeks ago Thomson Reuters announced that under pressure it was temporarily suspending an arrangement with a select group of clients that allowed them to receive the release of biweekly University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index two seconds before other clients. (They get the data five minutes before the public does – an eternity on Wall Street.)  For those two seconds extra, privileged investors have to pay $6000, but it can be well worth it: high frequency programs can trade up to 200,000 shares within the first 10 milliseconds of that two second window. Think of it: you still have all those milliseconds remaining. You can make a small fortune in less time than it takes to yawn or sip your coffee. The New York attorney general demanded that Reuters Thompson put a stop to the practice because of the unfair advantage it gave to the clients, claiming that heads up gave them a chance to effectively game the system. When I first heard that old saying – “time is money” – I didn’t realize just how much money they were talking about or how much – or little -- time.