Elsewhere in the solar system are other worlds, taking care of their business, working their quirky times. Saturn, for example, spins as snappily as it accessorizes, completing a day in 10½ hours; but being almost 10 times farther from the Sun than we are, it needs 30 of our years to finish one of its own. Mercury, by contrast, orbits the Sun in just 88 days, but rotates a miserly one and a half times during the entire mercurial “year,” which means that the side facing the sun has a chance to bake to 700 degrees Fahrenheit, while the half staring out into space turns as cold and miserable as that poor little demotee from the planetary pantheon, Pluto.  These various blends of diurnal and annual cycles are all perfectly comprehensible, if medically ill-advised. But just as the light that we humans deem “visible” represents a tiny part of the vast electromagnetic spectrum, so the collected clocks of the solar system are a meager sampling of the universal stock of tockers. Far more action is going on below the surface, in the subatomic community. There we find events occurring in increments far briefer than classic quickies like “in a heartbeat” (i.e., about a second) or “in the blink of an eye” (a tenth of a second), and down into the realms of scientific notation blessedly leavened with Marx Brothers nicknames — intervals like the attosecond (a millionth of a trillionth of a second, or 10-18 second), the zeptosecond (a billionth of a trillionth or 10-21 second) and, my personal favorite, the yoctosecond (a trillionth of a trillionth, or 10-24 second). No matter the nomenclature; the duck soup is ever astir. The time it takes a quark particle to circle around inside the proton of an atomic nucleus? Midway between zepto and yocto, or roughly 10-22 second. For an electron to orbit the proton to which it is madly, electromagnetically attracted? A not-quite-atto-sized 10-16 second.  Fleeting does not mean flaky or unstable, however. To the contrary: the fundamental quivers of the atom “are exceedingly regular,” Dr. Jaffe said, adding, “They mark the heartbeat of the universe.” Atomic events are so reliable, so like clockwork in their behavior, that we have started tuning our macroscopic timepieces to their standards, and our beloved second, once defined as a fraction of a solar day, is now officially linked to oscillations in a cesium atom.  Or look to the expanding firmaments, the unspeakably protracted pace of the space race. Cosmic time is as difficult to grasp as the twitchings of the atom, but it, too, is rule bound and reliable. Galaxies and clusters of galaxies are moving away from one another in defined intervals as the space between them expands like the rubber skin of an inflating balloon. They have been sailing outward from one another for nearly 14 billion years, since the staggering, soundless kaboom of the Big Bang set this and all clocks ticking, and they will continue their dispersal for tens of billions, hundreds of billions of years more.  We are poised between the extremities and homogeneities of nature, between delirium and ad infinitum, and our andante tempo may be the best, possibly the only pace open to us, or even to life generally. If we assume that whatever other intelligent beings that may be out there, in whatever alpha, beta or zepto barrio of the galaxy they may call home, arose through the gradual tragicomic tinkerings of natural selection, then they may well live lives proportioned much like ours, not too long and not too short. They’re dressed in a good pair of walking boots and taking it a day at a time. And if you listen closely you can hear them singing gibberish that sounds like Auld Lang Syne.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: Making Sense Of Time, Earthbound And Otherwise. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Let’s think about the nature of the seconds, days, seasons and years by which we humans calibrate our clocks and merrily spend down our lives.