00:00Ever have someone say,
00:01I'll be with you in a jiffy,
00:02only to discover their definition of a jiffy
00:04is apparently the better part of an hour?
00:07So have you always wondered the origin of in a jiffy?
00:11Well, the phrase has been around since the late 1700s.
00:14It most likely was a slang term for a moment.
00:17But the weird thing is, in recent decades,
00:18scientists have stepped in to give jiffy a precise meaning.
00:22For instance, in electrical engineering,
00:24a jiffy is one cycle of an alternating current,
00:27which equates to 1 60th of a second.
00:30And then science said,
00:31Wait, we can make this even more confusing.
00:34So in computing,
00:36Calculating jiffy.
00:37It's one click of a computer's internal clock.
00:40And in physics, a jiffy is the amount of time it takes for light
00:43to travel about one centimeter in a vacuum.
00:46That's roughly 33 picoseconds.
00:48So how long is that?
00:49Think of the blink of an eye.
00:51Okay.
00:52Then divide that by about a billion or so.
00:55Always wondered.
00:56Stream it now.
00:57Wherever you get your podcasts.
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