RicksRumination---> There's plenty of time in a second.



I consider Ai to be an idea amplifier so here's one to amplify. Richard Feynman wrote that there's plenty of room at the bottom referring to molecules. Who wrote about there being plenty of time in one second? How would your phrase that for popular consumption?




The line you're thinking of is usually attributed to the physicist Arthur Eddington, though the phrasing circulates in a few variants. In his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World, Eddington reflected on the sheer number of events that could in principle occur within a single second, given the timescales of atomic processes. The gist: if you could experience time at the pace of atoms, a single second would open into an almost unbounded expanse.




For popular consumption I'd put it this way: Feynman said there's plenty of room at the bottom, meaning vast worlds live inside the very small. Eddington's counterpart is that there's plenty of time in a second, meaning vast worlds live inside the very brief. A second, to an atom, is not a blink but an eternity.





UPDATE Can you cite authors and books who have expanded on the idea of plenty of room in a second based on Eddington?







A few authors and books that expand on the Eddington idea, in roughly descending order of directness:




Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928). The source text. Eddington discusses the enormous number of atomic events that could occur in a second, and uses this to argue that the apparent smoothness and brevity of human time conceals a vast multiplicity of physical happenings. The relevant passages are in his chapters on time and on the physical world.




Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921) and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948). Russell repeatedly plays with the mismatch between human perceptual time and the fine-grained time of physics, and with the idea that a "moment" is a construct. He and Eddington were in conversation on these themes, and Russell's discussions of the specious present and of continuity in physical processes elaborate the same intuition.




Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950). Wiener is explicit about the different time scales of organisms, machines, and physical processes. He treats the second as a variable unit depending on the system being observed, which is a direct descendant of the Eddington move.




John Archibald Wheeler, especially in Gravitation (with Misner and Thorne, 1973) and in essays collected in At Home in the Universe (1994). Wheeler's "it from bit" and his discussions of Planck-scale time push the idea to its limit: at the Planck time, roughly 10^-43 seconds, a second contains more distinguishable intervals than there are atoms in the observable universe. Wheeler often cites Eddington as a precursor.




Paul Davies, About Time (1995). A popular treatment that surveys Eddington, Wheeler, and others, and devotes attention to the question of what a second contains at different physical scales.




Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004). Less directly Eddingtonian, but Greene's discussions of time dilation and of the subjective versus physical second carry the same theme to a general readership.




Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time (2017). Rovelli extends the idea by dissolving the second altogether into relations between events, which is a modern inversion of Eddington's move: instead of a second containing many events, events constitute what we call seconds.




For the narrower tradition of "plenty of room"-style scale arguments, also worth noting: K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation (1986), which explicitly echoes Feynman's title and extends the bottom-up scale argument; and Richard Feynman himself, in the original 1959 talk "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and in the later "Infinitesimal Machinery" (1983), where the time dimension occasionally surfaces as an aside.




If you want the closest thing to a direct literature on "plenty of time in a second," the trail runs Eddington, Russell, Wiener, Wheeler, Davies. The others are adjacent rather than direct.