We are all sometimes overwhelmed by the speed with which time passes. But what is the difference between 1 million and 1 billion seconds?
What is the difference in seconds? This is much bigger than it seems.
One million seconds is about 11.5 days. A billion seconds is about 31 years and 8 months, .
What is the difference between 1 million and 1 billion seconds?
The Persian scholar Al-Biruni was the first to use the term “second”, around the year 1000. He defined it (like the day, hour and minute) as a fraction of the lunar cycle. The first to mark seconds appeared in the 16th century, and in 1644 the French mathematician Marin Mersenne used a pendulum to define the second for the first time, leading to the international adoption of floor pendulum clocks by the end of the century the seventeenth.
In the 19th century, scientific institutions worked to define the second in astronomical terms, and in the 1940s its definition was established internationally as 1/86,400 of a mean solar day.
Who first defined the second?
In the 1950s, researchers realized that it was not constant enough to provide a standard unit of time. So the second was redefined according to the length of a year and officially became the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the year 1900. However, this definition did not last long.
During the same period, the first accurate atomic clocks using cesium were developed. Finally, there was a natural phenomenon precise and constant enough to define the second. In 1967, the Thirteenth General Conference of the International Committee for Weights and Measures officially defined the second as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 radiation periods corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom”. This definition has remained official ever since, .
