Convert Hour (h) to Femtosecond (fs) instantly.
About these units
Hour (h)
An hour, defined as 60 minutes or 3,600 seconds, is one of the most universally recognized time units. It emerged from ancient Egyptian timekeeping, where daylight was divided into 12 equal segments, a tradition that eventually influenced Greek and Roman clocks. The hour structures human activities: work schedules, travel planning, academic periods, medical dosing intervals, and astronomical observations. Its widespread adoption across cultures demonstrates the human tendency to organize life into consistent, predictable cycles. Even in scientific contexts where seconds dominate, the hour persists in fields like meteorology, orbital mechanics (e.g., solar time), and industrial processes. It bridges the gap between precise atomic time and everyday human experience.
Femtosecond (fs)
A femtosecond equals 10⁻¹⁵ seconds, a staggering scale where fundamental molecular motions occur. Chemical bonds vibrate, break, and rearrange on femtosecond timescales. Ultrafast spectroscopy—pioneered by Ahmed Zewail, who won the Nobel Prize for this work—uses femtosecond laser pulses to "freeze" molecular reactions and observe them in real time. Femtosecond lasers allow extraordinary precision in surgery and microfabrication, producing minimal heat diffusion and ultraclean cuts. At this scale, time ceases to be a continuous blur and becomes granular in terms of molecular motion, giving rise to the field of femtochemistry and revolutionizing our understanding of reaction dynamics.