Rontosecond
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An SI unit of time equal to 10⁻²⁷ seconds. Symbol: rs
"No. Say there are 100 seats and it takes 2 seconds to swap seats. After about 12 seats the remaining 88 seats are all <1 second per seat, but you have nearly 3 minutes swapping time. So remove the 198 seconds for every seat swap leaving 7,002 seconds. The fastest human action is a fingersnap at .007 seconds. You'll drop below that by seat 20, meaning it is no longer possible for a human to touch a seat that quickly intentionally. Seat 100 you sit in for .0000000000000000000000000055 seconds, or 5.5 rontoseconds. You haven't quite hit Plank time here, so it is at least physically possible to have something do this, but its so outside the human ability to comprehend a trillion trillion of them makes it to the very edge of human perception. The shortest possible laser pulse is 1 billion times longer than this. A 5 GHz processor is one quintillion times slower than this."
Example
More examples"No. Say there are 100 seats and it takes 2 seconds to swap seats. After about 12 seats the remaining 88 seats are all <1 second per seat, but you have nearly 3 minutes swapping time. So remove the 198 seconds for every seat swap leaving 7,002 seconds. The fastest human action is a fingersnap at .007 seconds. You'll drop below that by seat 20, meaning it is no longer possible for a human to touch a seat that quickly intentionally. Seat 100 you sit in for .0000000000000000000000000055 seconds, or 5.5 rontoseconds. You haven't quite hit Plank time here, so it is at least physically possible to have something do this, but its so outside the human ability to comprehend a trillion trillion of them makes it to the very edge of human perception. The shortest possible laser pulse is 1 billion times longer than this. A 5 GHz processor is one quintillion times slower than this."
Etymology
From ronto- + second.
More for "rontosecond"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.