Think you're fast?

From the air, it looks like a half-open switchblade knife, with a smaller appendage following the main blade. Located inside the Taramani campus of the University of Madras, the National Centre for Ultra-Fast Processes appears more like a bureaucratic office than the high-tech research facility it is.

The only one of its kind in the country, the NCUFP was set up to help researchers understand what happens in structures - physical, chemical or biological - during certain processes which take place in infinestimally small slices of time. The mind boggles so much at the mere description of such time-slices: nano-, pico- and femto-seconds, the last named being equal to 1 X 10^-15 of a second, that it is unable to imagine anything which can happen within that time. Apparently a lot of things do happen, enough to keep 4 full-time faculty members (and 2 Emeritus Professors in addition) busy guiding the 15 or so students doing their doctoral research in - well, some highly specialized areas. Typically, their research is around chemical processes, which usually take a few hundred femtoseconds to be completed.

The femtosecond, however is not the smallest unit of time that has been observed until now; that distinction goes to the attosecond, which is 1 X 10^-18 of a second (or a thousandth of a femtosecond). But even the attosecond is not the theoretical smallest unit of time. For the theoretical scientist, that would be Planck Time, which is the time taken for light in a vacuum to travel one unit of Planck Length (the smallest distance about which anything can be known, theoretically); the equivalent of 5.39 X 10^-44 seconds.

You certainly need more than just sharp eyes to spot the action at that speed - and here's Chennai using those eyes for all of us, all over the world!