Scientists are learning to observe and control the incredibly rapid behavior of molecules, atoms and even the electrons inside atoms....The flashing laser would in effect create a series of "snapshots" that could be recorded and then watched in sequence - creating what would amount to a extreme slo-mo movie of chemical bonds actually forming: a direct view of one of the most basic processes of the universe, and one that could dramatically enhance our understanding of how nature works on that most fundamental level.
[P]hysicists have found ways to create extremely short flashes of laser light, which they can use like strobe lamps to "freeze" atomic motions. It's like photographing a 100-mph baseball as it nears home plate, only a billion (or a quintillion) times faster. ...
Scientists expect that the new technology will let them watch the clouds of electrons that glue atoms together shift and flow as they form molecules.
Just how short are the time periods we're talking about here?
In March of this year, an all-European team led by [Ferenc] Krausz[, a pioneer in ultra-fast research at the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany,] reported that it can control electronic motion with a precision of 44 attoseconds. ...An attosecond is one quintillionth of a second, or, in scientific notation, 1x10-18 second. Expressed another way, one attosecond is to one second as one second is to more than 31 million years.
"A pulse duration of well below 10 attoseconds should be feasible," Krausz said.
On the other hand, we've still got a long way to go to probe time to its limits: The fundamental unit, or quantum, of time, is called the Planck time. It's 1x10-43 second. Put another way, one attosecond is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 million billion billion) times longer than one Planck time. If one Planck time was stretched to cover one second, one attosecond would span over 300 trillion years: over 15,000 times longer than the age of the universe.
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