One of the biggest news stories of 2023 in the world of physics was the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to a trio of physicists who helped develop methods for probing physics on tiny timescales: attosecond-level timescales. There are processes in this Universe that happen incredibly quickly — on timescales that are unfathomably fast compared to a human’s perception — and detecting and measuring these processes are of paramount importance if we want to understand what occurs at the most fundamental levels of reality.
Getting down to attosecond-level precision is an incredible achievement; after all, an attosecond represents just 1 part in 10¹??? of a second: a billionth of a billionth of a second. As fast as that is, however, it isn’t fast enough to measure everything that occurs in nature. Remember that there are four fundamental forces in nature: