The speed of light in a jiffy

QUESTION

Is a ‘jiffy’ an actual unit of measurement? INFORMALLY, a ‘jiffy’ can be any short period of time, and this appears to have been the word’s original intent.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from Baron Munchausen’s Narrative Of His Marvellous Travels And Campaigns In russia (1785), by rudolf Erich raspe: ‘In six jiffies I found myself and all my retinue...at the rock of Gibraltar.’

The term’s origin is uncertain, but the Chambers Dictionary Of Etymology speculates that the word might have been ‘spontaneously coined’ by raspe.

Around 1920, U.S. chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875-1946) proposed that the light centimetre — the time it takes for light to travel one centimetre in a vacuum (33.3564 picoseconds) — be called a jiffy, since when it has been widely understood in physics, but it is not an official measurement.

Lewis was the first to develop a method of isolating ‘heavy water’ (deuterium oxide). He was nominated 35 times for a Nobel Prize, but never received one.

Jiffy has since been used informally as a measurement in several scientific fields. In electrical engineering, jiffy originally related to alternating currents. Specifically, it was 0.02 seconds, the time between AC power cycles.

Today, it is often considered 0.01 seconds (10 milliseconds), which is the resolution of most common stopwatches.

Liam Naughton, Rochdale.

QUESTION

The Panama hat and the Hundred Years War are notable for having been misnamed. What other events or items have been given the wrong name? FURTHER to earlier answers, astronomer Fred Hoyle named the Big Bang yet, ironically, opposed the theory.

He used the words while deriding the theory as ‘a hot big bang’ in a 1949 BBC radio programme.

The real inventor of the idea was the priest and scientist Georges Lemaitre, who called it the ‘hypothesis of the primeval atom’ or the ‘Cosmic Egg’.