a minute=60 sec; a moment = ?

August 5, 2008 2:23 AM

How long is a moment?

I would like to know if a moment can be measured, and if it can, what would be the maximum length.

posted by hadjiboy to writing & language (34 comments total)

I'd say it's the maximum time that can elapse before the person who's been asked to 'hang on a moment', or who is 'caught up in the moment' notices. So it's probably very context-specific.
posted by dowcrag at 2:34 AM on August 5

If you mean the minimum duration of time that can exist, if time is in fact a quantum (discrete measurable individual unit) type of phenomena as opposed to a continuous flow, the answer may be the period time it takes light to travel across a Planck Length (1.6 × 10 to the 35th meters). I don't see how we could measure anything less but perhaps I am mistaken.

This is my first post and I am not a quantum physicist but I have thought about this answer myself and like I state above, there may be no way to measure any shorter duration, so therefore, this is the shortest duration of time.
posted by OneCrayon at 2:36 AM on August 5

A moment cannot be measured.
posted by longsleeves at 2:39 AM on August 5

Kind of a random chatty question, but I'll bite. A 'moment' could be the entire duration of a major historical event like a battle, a coup or a coronation, so it could conceivably stretch to days or even weeks. One could even talk about the extinction of the dinosaurs as a 'moment' in geological time; in short, a 'moment' is so bound up in context as to make the question about as meaningful as 'what is a pie?'.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 2:49 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]

Oops, somehow my negative (-) sign got dropped in my above answer. A Planck Length is 1.6 x 10 to the negative 35th meters. Sorry.
posted by OneCrayon at 2:55 AM on August 5

It is a length of time shorter than that which makes you impatiently check your watch. [I think OneCrayon is talking about "an instant"].
posted by rongorongo at 3:07 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]

Why not. How's this: where Event A and Event B are bridged by a moment, the time elapsed from the beginning of Event A to the end of Event B, minus the total length in time of Event A and the total length in time of Event B (to date).

So, if you asked for a moment to consider between hearing the terms and signing the paper, where 10 minutes elapsed between hearing the terms and signing the paper, and hearing the terms took 8 minutes and signing the paper took 5 seconds, your moment was one minute and 55 seconds.

If the light has turned green, and you are still thinking about last night, your moment = elapsed time from when the light first turned red to the end of the first honk - (length of time the light was red + length of first honk).

If the Interregnum was a long, fraught moment between the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, blah et cetera.
posted by Your Time Machine Sucks at 3:45 AM on August 5

Yes, it can. A moment is calculated as the force applied multiplied by the perpendicular distance from the pivot to the force.

Oh, right.

However, a "jiffy" can be measured, it's the time taken for light to travel 1cm, about 33ps. So next time somebody tells you they'll be "back in a jiffy", you can call them a liar.
posted by alby at 3:53 AM on August 5

The letter M.
posted by paradoxflow at 3:57 AM on August 5

Forgot maximum length. Linguistically, a moment is significantly smaller than the total time of the significant events which surround it. The maximum length of a moment is significantly smaller than all time. It wouldn't be amiss to refer to life on Earth as a moment if you are comparing it to the age of the universe.
posted by Your Time Machine Sucks at 4:04 AM on August 5

Anywhere between an instant and a while.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 4:05 AM on August 5

A moment is 5 seconds when your attention is needed, but you currently cannot give it.
A moment is about 1 second when it involves something or someone disappearing.
A moment is about 2 minutes when there is bueurocracy or offices involved.

The outer limit for a moment is when you switch into 'waiting' mode, which happens quite quickly with humans.
posted by ChabonJabon at 4:21 AM on August 5

A sixtieth of a second

A moment, on some Arabic calendars, denotes one sixtieth of a second in the same way that a second denotes one sixtieth of a minute in English time. How difficult it must be to capture the essence of a moment.
posted by handybitesize at 5:26 AM on August 5

I think of a moment as a point, not a duration, but I think OneCrayon's right saying a photon moving a plank length is the shortest possible time period.
posted by Plug Dub In at 5:42 AM on August 5

When I was a kid, a friend told me that a moment was officially 90 seconds. Even though he made that up, I've used that definition ever since.
posted by Who_Am_I at 5:42 AM on August 5

Wikipedia on Planck time (what one crayon was talking about).
posted by gauchodaspampas at 6:21 AM on August 5

I heard the same, Who_Am_I; the friend who told me was Jewish Orthodox, and said it was the traditional definition of the length of time it took to consider ... I've forgotten the rest. But I still use the 90 seconds thing as a moment.
posted by scruss at 6:22 AM on August 5

When I was a kid, a friend told me that a moment was officially 90 seconds.

Bingo! That's what I was looking for; someone in my class told me that a moment is equal to 90 seconds. (I wanted to clarify if anyone had ever heard this before, but it seemed pretty unlikely to me to confine a moment to just 1 and a half minutes... !)

Has anyone else heard of this before, and if you have--do you think you can cite a reference for where I can obtain this information. Thanks!
posted by hadjiboy at 6:31 AM on August 5

On preview: thanks scruss, but would you happen to know where I can find it online?
posted by hadjiboy at 6:32 AM on August 5

I've heard that a moment was 90 seconds, too. When I was playing Oregon Trail and other Apple IIe games in elementary school, and the "One moment, please..." screen stayed up for about that length of time, I figured there was some weight to the 90 second claim.

I've second-guessed that definition plenty of times since then, though. Now I consider a moment to be a pause of indiscriminate length.
posted by phatkitten at 6:45 AM on August 5

I think it's a fuzzy term, meaning "a relatively short period of time."

Having said that, I'm surprised by to 90-second estimate. If someone said to me, "Let me think about that for a moment," and then was silent for 90 seconds, I'd check his pulse. I'd expect maybe 10 or 20 seconds at most.
posted by grumblebee at 6:57 AM on August 5

(But I live in New York City.)
posted by grumblebee at 6:57 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]

Just for fun, the smallest moment in the Buddhist tradition is said to be 1/64th of the time it takes to snap your fingers. You can conceive of moments shorter of that, but for some reason they've decided that is as small as time can be divided and thoughts can't arise faster than that. So random. So funny.
posted by milarepa at 7:13 AM on August 5

I also have the moment=90s definition in my head. Also heard it as a kid.
posted by whiskeyspider at 7:38 AM on August 5

Bingo! That's what I was looking for; someone in my class told me that a moment is equal to 90 seconds.

While it's interesting that there's at least anecdata for some 90-second reading of the word (see also discussions of the quantitative value of "some", "few", "couple", etc), I think it's pretty important to be clear, if it isn't already, that "a moment" is a fundamentally fuzzy, non-quantifiable value. It is defined wholly by context in common usage.
posted by cortex at 7:39 AM on August 5

90 seconds is more like an eternity. A moment is not that long. A moment can be captured in a photograph. If it were 90 seconds long, you'd need a movie.
posted by beagle at 7:40 AM on August 5

It is apparently a definition from medieval time: see here, one moment is equal to 1.5 minutes. Makes sense. I was really into medieval stuff as a kid.
posted by whiskeyspider at 7:45 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]

People also use "moment" to mean "a short period of time fraught with significance," as in, "She and I had a moment."
posted by grumblebee at 8:13 AM on August 5

Ah, interesting, whiskeyspider. That got me to check the OED, where the second major definition of "moment, n." is "a definite unit of time", which covers a few different intervals:

a. In medieval reckoning: the tenth part of a ‘point’ (POINT n.1 2c), i.e. the fortieth or the fiftieth part of an hour. Cf. MOMENTUM n. 1. Now hist.

b. In rabbinical reckoning (based on the lunar month): of an hour (3 seconds). Obs. rare.

c. A second. In later use only in moment-hand n. at Compounds. Obs.

d. Geol. A period of geological time corresponding to a stratigraphical zone (as defined by its fossil content).

So: ninety seconds, 3 seconds, 1 second, and something on a geological timescale; and all but the last of those is cited as between 200 and 700 years old. The most recent cite for (a) is the year 1621, which undercuts somewhat the idea that that's what "a moment" means anything but a bar-bet or historical lexicography sense; and the whole section on moment-as-discrete-measure-of-time makes up all of one thirtieth of the whole entry on "moment".
posted by cortex at 8:23 AM on August 5

OK - well on the 90s seconds theory = from this discussion: "This seems to be a medieval use of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes from John of Trevisa (1398): “A day [contains] foure quadrantes. And a quadrant conteynyth syxe houres. And an houre foure poyntes. And a poynt .x. momentes. And a moment twelue vnces. And an vnce seuen and fourty attomos. “

More details on John of Trevisa.
posted by rongorongo at 8:44 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]

A moment is any amount of time that can pass you unawares. This is why being focused on experience and not analysis is called "being in the moment."
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:10 AM on August 5

Well how about that, I had no idea that the "moment==90s" thing actually had any merit. I guess I should apologize to that guy for telling him that lightning bugs are poisonous stinging insects.
posted by Who_Am_I at 10:30 AM on August 5

How big is a "place?"
posted by grobstein at 11:05 AM on August 5

Trying to pursue the above lead a little further: the source of the above is probably a book from 1240 called "De Proprietatibus Rerum" (On the Properties of Things) by Bartholomeus Anglicus. This was one of the first encyclopaedia and dealt with properties of time amongst many other subjects. The English edition was translated by John of Tevisa in 1398. I have been unable to find a copy online but would love to see one.

So we have:
1 day divided 4 quadrants of 6 hours each. Each hour is then divided into 4 poynts of 15 minutes each. There are 10 moments of 90 seconds in a poynt (Roger Bacon was the first person to write about seconds in English - but not until 1267 apparently). Moments are then subdivided into twelve vnces of 7.5 seconds each. Finally we have 47 attomos of about 0.16 seconds in a vnce.
posted by rongorongo at 11:48 AM on August 5 [1 favorite]