We’ve all heard it before. “I’ll be back in a jiffy!”. But what does jiffy really mean? Is it a real measurement? At one point yes it was.
It is technically one trillionth of a second. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries there was a scientist named Gilbert Newton Lewis who figured out that a jiffy was the amount of time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum. Which is about about 33.4 picoseconds. Or one trillionth of a second.
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