Time Has Told Me

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As an erstwhile photographer and technician, time - let alone for a musician or poet - is kind of central to one's activity, no matter the physical domain or the era in which you are working. The basic equation is sensitivity (of the medium capturing the image formed by whatever means you employ: mostly cameras of some sort or another) equals intensity (of the light illuminating the subject being photographed) multiplied by the length of the exposure of the medium to that particular intensity of light.

Under any normal circumstances, a camera or similar device - film or digital - captures the reflected light from a subject in anything from 1/30s to 1/1000s. I've taken multi-minute night exposures which, with film, requires a lot of compensatory calculation in the processing of that film; due to a phenomenon called reciprocity failure, where the linear relationship between exposure (time x intensity) breaks down, and increasingly extended chemical development time is required to compensate for the effect.

At the upper speed end of film still-camera technology, for many years, the limit was 1/1000s and later 1/2000s, reaching pretty much its apogee with cameras like the Nikon F4, which could cut exposure time to 1/8000s. These days, digital cameras can easily better this, and with ultra-sensitive sensors can achieve light capturing capabilities completely alien to the film world.

When I was a photographic technician at Birmingham University, back in the mists of time, we used to - as I've mentioned before - do some high-speed 16mm photography that ran into 10,000 frames-per-second territory. Even then, it was possible to get to a million frames-per-second, but the trade-off with all of this stuff was image quality and the duration of capture possible. These days, it's entirely normal - at some expense - to be able to routinely capture high-definition, full colour video at one million frames per second for extended periods of - ahem! - time: just scan YouTube for loads of examples.

But, in terms of shortness of time, all of this stuff pales into absolute microcosmic insignificance compared to the achievements of the Attosecond Mob. I refer here rather crudely to the Nobel Laureate researchers engaged in extremely short pulse laser research. They have produced pulses of light in the order of 20 attoseconds long. I won't even try to express that arithmetically because it won't give any sense of scale to a non-mathematician, myself included. But to give it some sense of scale, my 120-year-old German pendulum clock is currently beating at two beats per second. So, for every tick-tock of my old clock [sorry] - one second - there are more attoseconds than there are seconds in the entire life of the Universe itself: 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years. Sobering thought, eh?

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