If you think a nanosecond is unfathomably small at 10 raised to minus nine or a billionth of a second, then think about an attosecond. It is 10 raised to minus 18 or a billionth of a billionth of a second.
If you want understand electron dynamics, you need to operate at the scale of attoseconds. That's what this year's winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics have been doing. They are Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier.
The citation accompanying the prize is striking. It says, "Fast-moving events flow into each other when perceived by humans, just like a film that consists of still images is perceived as continual movement. If we want to investigate really brief events, we need special technology. In the world of electrons, changes occur in a few tenths of an attosecond – an attosecond is so short that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe. The laureates’ experiments have produced pulses of light so short that they are measured in attoseconds, thus demonstrating that these pulses can be used to provide images of processes inside atoms and molecules."
Just think about this bit: "an attosecond is so short that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe."
To begin with our brains are not equipped to fully process the passage of even one second, let alone a nanosecond, a femtosecond (which is a millionth of a billionth of a second) and then an attosecond. Add to the fact that atoms are the smallest unit of matter. Residing within an atom are electrons, protons and neutrons. It is that electron dynamics that attosecond measurement offers insights into. My point is that it is beyond pointless to grasp this scale because we cannot and yet Agostini. Krausz and L’Huillier did that.
At the atomic level and even smaller, it is no surprise then that our material world becomes a blur within a blur within a blur. Hence, for us it is nonexistent for all practical purposes. So what are we as a life form squabbling and arguing over at our macro scale? Essentially, as a collection of blurry atoms and even blurrier electrons-neutrons-protons we are just entangling our blurs. It does not resolve anything.
The moral of this post? There is none.