A quote often attributed to the US showman P. T. Barnum is, "there's a sucker born every minute". Does this make counting new-born suckers a good way of measuring time? A second, rather than a minute, might be closer to our hearts -- as our heartbeatis nearly a second long -- but even this scale might still be too long or too short, depending on what there is to measure. Our Universe, according to the 'big bang' theory, is about 14 billion years, or 5 x 10~(17) seconds (s) old. The ultimate timescale ('Planck time') of quantum cosmology -- approximately 10~(-43) s, the big bang's birth flash -- is an elementary grain or pixel of time, within which our normal physics of four-dimensional space and time breaks down into much greater number of dimensions as hypothesized by the 'superstring' theory.
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机译：经常引用美国艺人巴纳姆（P. T. Barnum）的话说：“每分钟都有一个傻瓜出生。”这是否使新生儿吸盘计数成为衡量时间的好方法？一秒钟而不是一分钟，可能会更接近我们的心脏-因为我们的心跳将近一秒之久-但根据所要测量的大小，即使是这种规模也可能太长或太短。根据“大爆炸”理论，我们的宇宙大约有140亿年，即5 x 10〜（17）秒。量子宇宙学的最终时标（“普朗克时间”）约为10〜（-43）s，即大爆炸的诞生闪光，它是时间的基本粒子或像素，在此范围内我们的四维空间和时间分解成“超弦”理论所假设的更多维度。
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