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They "watched" parts of a molecule moving on an attosecond timescale - where one attosecond equals one billion-billionth of a second.

Ye gods!!! :blink:

We have the opposite in Spain, its called a mañana syndrome ;)

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Fundamental question about the time scale involved. Is it based on the short American system of a billion being 1000 million or the original and correct English version of a billion being one million million? The difference equates to a factor of a million. Sad but that comes from the USA habit of exaggeration, my Chemical Bible "Handbook of Chemistry and Physics 56th Ed. !975-!976" does give the atto as 10^-18. Sad but it was published in the States.

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Fundamental question about the time scale involved. Is it based on the short American system of a billion being 1000 million or the original and correct English version of a billion being one million million? The difference equates to a factor of a million. Sad but that comes from the USA habit of exaggeration, my Chemical Bible "Handbook of Chemistry and Physics 56th Ed. !975-!976" does give the atto as 10^-18. Sad but it was published in the States.

It is strange how logic and numeric accuracy change when they get to the other side of the Atlantic. Take for example the Kilo. I am sure that if ever a Kilogram of gold was weighed out it would be 1000 gms, compared to a the strange idea of the number of bytes in a Kilobyte.

Hexadecimal numbers got round some number manipulation problems, and another less ambiguous way could have been found for byte quantities. But then what should we expect from the land from where instructions such as "CLICK FINISH TO CONTINUE STARTING WINDOWS" come?

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