Durations in Perspective — Time intervals spanning eighty-six orders of magnitude are plotted as dots on the spiral below (hold mouse arrow over each dot to reveal illustrations). When time is measured in human-centered intervals, many phenomena seem fleeting. For example, in conventional units the lifetime of the lambda, a subatomic particle, is extremely brief, 10–10 second (translucent blue cylinder). Yet the lambda is a highly stable system: The quarks that make it up orbit one another a trillion times before the particle disintegrates. For comparison, that is 200 times the number of orbits the Earth has completed around the Sun in the 4.6 billion years since the planet was formed (translucent yellow cylinder). Illustration by Advanced Illustrations Ltd (www.advancedillustration.co.uk)
