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statues are not utterly unchanging, but that they are, in fact, moving! Controversy would erupt. It would be well known that, although most of the statues’ eyes are open, some are half-closed, while a minority are completely closed. Using comparison photographs gathered from over a century, the Femtonian scientist would show how the eyelids of a particular statue with half-closed eyes have moved incrementally over thedecades. “Preposterous!” would be the response from the dissenting scientists. “How could statues move? I suppose next you’ll be telling us they’re alive?”
    But the Femtonians have already been usurped by a smaller, faster civilization. Briefer even than femtoseconds are attoseconds, clocking at a staggeringly tiny portion of time: a billionth of a billionth of a second. From the perspective of an attosecond, one of our seconds lasts three million years, the same amount of time it took humans to evolve. Yet still smaller units of time are being sought after. David Blair, an Australian physicist, has built the most accurate clock yet in order to try and measure gravitational waves. Even though they knit our galaxy together, gravitational waves are ineffable, with extraordinarily weak emissions. They have never been detected. Blair hopes his new clock will be fast enough to catch them. His timepiece is not as stable as an atomic clock over long periods, but in the short term it is accurate to one part in a hundred trillion over three hundred seconds. At its heart is a sapphire crystal that is kept at –273° Celsius in a bath of liquid helium, capable of measuring a trillion-trillionth of a second.
    At this scale of duration the only events that move fast enough to be measured are sub-atomic events: the lifetime of quarks and the breaking of atomic bonds. It is a jumpy, quivering world of electrons and particles. And that’s where everything converges. If our coastline surveyors insisted on measuring the entire edge of their shoreline—attending to smaller and smaller inlets and points until they were accounting for edges of pebbles, then grains of sand, then molecules and finally the edges of atoms—they would arrive at the same place, the same time frame as a cesium clock. You have to have a very fast ruler to measure subatomic shorelines; they keep changing. There comes a point, at the infinitesimal scale of things, where not only time and mass converge but also gravity and light. In that tiny, furiouslyquick world, light moves like molasses and mass disappears into energy. Perhaps, as Blair hopes, the secret of gravity might be lurking there as well.
    But if clocks get more accurate, particularly if they become accurate to within a millisecond in three million years, then, due to relativistic effects, simply walking around with one will slow it down measurably. Also, elevation will change the pace, since time runs slower at the surface of the planet than higher up. This effect is already measurable. Due to relativity, clocks at the top of Mount Everest run faster than those at sea level, pulling ahead by about thirty microseconds a year. Time too, when reduced to its smallest parts, becomes slippery and indeterminate. It may well be that there is a limit beyond which the smallest portions of time cannot be measured.
    A ND Y ET …
    “Now,” from the perspective of an attosecond, is a very fleeting thing, impossible to seize. It makes our “now” seem to stretch for an eternity, at least relatively, even if, from our perspective, the present moment is as mercurial as any small division of time. Because it is all we have, this small moment is also the most precious, an oasis in the sands of time. Yet “now” has another scale, in the opposite direction from the abyss of milliseconds and nanoseconds. There is a bigger “now.”
    In terms of our consensual “now,” the one we all agree on, we consciously occupy a slice, perhaps a quarter of a second, and that is our time frame. Most living