Talk:Attosecond

Time to move around hydrogen

I'll remove

"24 attoseconds - the time taken for an electron to travel from one side of a hydrogen atom to the other"

This statement, while cited to a news service, seems somewhat senseless. What it refers to is the atomic unit of time which:

$\delta t\approx {\frac {\hbar }{\mathrm {E} }}\approx 24$ attoseconds

Where E is the Hartree energy.

The only way to detect "position" is to decohere the electron.. ie scatter off it. But if you scatter off the electron, you impart it with momentum... One can talk about characteristic uncertenty in time associated with the ground state hydrogen atom, but that's it.

IlyaV (talk) 05:37, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

PS: I added atomic unit of time to the list... so I guess I remove one I add one :) IlyaV (talk) 05:58, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

One billionth of one billionth

Wouldn't it be better to title this article "attosecond"? Instead of scientific notation? (Not that many people grok SN.)

Senseless repetition

1. 320 attoseconds – estimated time it takes electrons to hop between atoms
2. 640 attoseconds – twice the estimated time it takes electrons to hop between atoms

Is it just me or is this pointless? Tomhosking (talk) 21:17, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Overhaul

I made some relatively large edits. I hope I have improved the quality of the stub.SpaceManDoom (talk) 22:40, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn.t the fact that you can create a visual use photon in a few attoseconds be an argument in favor of light being particulate? Because the amount of energy contained in an attosecond's length of an electromagnetic wave would be practically zero. WFPM (talk) 13:23, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Since the velocity of light is 10E10.5 cm/sec, a 10E-18s time period only allows a motion distance of 10E-7.5cm/attosecond, which is only a few atomic diameters. Boy!! Talk about close up viewing!!.WFPM (talk) 20:10, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Asimov was concerned with the time involved for an atom to react to a nearby fast neutron, and he created a time interval he called a "Chronon" which was the time for light to travel a distance of 1 fermi (10E-13cm). This time interval was thus 10E-23.5s, so there are smaller time intervals.WFPM (talk) 20:26, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

The following is a closed discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was move all Anthony Appleyard (talk) 09:38, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
1 E-18 s → Attosecond — "Attosecond" is a well known SI unit, and a word. Wnt (talk) 21:30, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

The title in exponential notation is also recognizable, but could be written in many slightly different ways, and it really is a mathematical formula (1 times ten to the -18) plus an abbreviation ("s" for seconds). There are some other pages in this format - in the See Also links the 10^-19 page is still active, but the 10^-15 page has been redirected to orders of magnitude (time). I strongly believe that attoseconds deserve their own page because it is a place to compare quantities and (one hopes with further development) tools and techniques for measurement. That can be done if the page is about a notable SI unit "attosecond", but eventually someone would challenge the idea of having a page for every real number of seconds.

I should note that I think this move shouldn't be controversial, but I wasn't sure - I'd have moved it myself but a separate article at Attosecond was merged into this one previously. I don't want to just merge back the opposite direction because this has the longer edit history. Wnt (talk) 21:30, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Note: The following page moves have been added to the request. The same reasoning applies for all. Jafeluv (talk) 11:11, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

• 1 E-15 s → Femtosecond
• 1 E-12 s → Picosecond
• 1 E-9 s → Nanosecond
• 1 E-6 s → Microsecond

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's naming conventions.

• Support — I think that this is a simple clarity issue, personally. "Attosecond" is an actual word, after all... barring the citation of any guidelines or other information that would suggest that this is a bad idea, the reasoning supplied in the proposal is certainly sound.
  — V = I * R (talk) 04:52, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

• Support for clarity, but this is part of a broader issue with 1 E-15 s, 1 E-12 s, 1 E-9 s and 1 E-6 s (which I think should all be moved similarly). 1 E-3 s already redirects to Millisecond. There is even 1 E0 s. Kanguole 12:52, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

• Support moving all pages to (prefix)second format. Our article names should be optimized for a general audience instead of specialists. Jafeluv (talk) 00:21, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

  Agreed. Turning this into a multi-move would be a good idea.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 02:44, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

   Done. Jafeluv (talk) 11:11, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

• Support - I had no idea what 1 E-18 s meant when I saw this move request. Even without knowing what specific number atto refers to off the top of my head, I can tell that an attosecond is a very small measurement of time. For that reason alone (i.e., accessability to non-experts) the page should be moved. Parsecboy (talk) 17:28, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
• Comment. I've left out the positive orders of magnitude from this move request for now. For a complete list, see Template:Ordersofmagnitudeseconds (whose creator needs to be informed that our naming conventions do not forbid the use of spacebars in template names, by the way). Some of these cases are more complicated (like 1 E0 s, which is just one second), so filing a separate request for them would seem best. The ones listed are in my opinion the less controversial ones. Jafeluv (talk) 20:35, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
• Support move. I would support the other exponential ones being moved as well to the appropriate English-language name. Good Ol’factory ^(talk) 05:38, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
• Comment. While doing some revision on the four articles listed above to stand under their own names, I came to realize that this system of articles for powers of ten is very widespread - not just seconds, but meters, hertz --- there's even a large article 1 E+5 m², for example. And many of these articles are going to have complicated merge histories, some having been merged and recreated multiple times. It is going to take a WikiProject to figure out what to do with all this stuff. Wnt (talk) 17:56, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Physical Nonsense

I just removed

• 150 attoseconds – the time it takes for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom.

since this is physical nonsense. In the case that the nucleus is HUGE, and the electron is valence, there may be an argument that this makes sense. There must be some mention of the size for this to possibly be sensible. Otherwise, the electron isn't moving!!!!!. /childish-annoyance-at-implicitly-broad-use-of-Bohr-model 129.107.227.215 (talk) 03:40, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

References

Archived reference (original is dead): "Electron filmed for first time ever" (PDF). Lunds Universitet. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-09-10. Jimw338 (talk) 20:07, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Why List-class?

This may be an odd question, but as I was looking through the level-5 vital articles I noticed this and some other fractions of seconds were marked as list-class articles, when they don't appear to lists. If I'm not mistaken, I should think this article would be a stub or start class, but I don't want to go changing the rating in case there was a reason behind it. If anyone sees this, please ping me if you have an answer, but if not I'm going to change all of these articles to proper ratings. Thanks, Fritzmann2002 ^{T, c, s, t} 01:19, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

@Fritzmann2002: I'd say go for it – this certainly doesn't seem like a list. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 02:51, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Correct Simple Wikipedia?

Maybe the real culprit is low accuracy, but I guess it would be good if Simple Wikipedia gave the same info as this article – or vice versa. Right now it reads:

It takes 1 attosecond for light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms.--Geke (talk) 17:50, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

Cleaned up this entry, but Simple English Wikipedia can burn to the ground for all I care. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 18:08, 6 December 2019 (UTC)