Got a minute? Would you believe that a “jiffy” refers to an actual unit of time? Originating in the late 18th century as slang for lightning, the word was co-opted by physical chemist Gilbert Norton Lewis to describe the amount of time it takes for light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum. Needless to say, it’s faster than the blink of an eye, at about 33.3564 picoseconds. Given that lightning’s visible radiation travels at the speed of light, jiffy’s leap from nickname to nanosecond-splitting speed is a natural one. Not coincidentally, Dr. Lewis also created the now-familiar word photon to describe a unit of light—be it particle or wave. Now, if it took you more than the minute requested to read this post, you might want to work on increasing your reading speed…by a jiffy or two.
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