Convert Minute (min) to Femtosecond (fs) instantly.
About these units
Minute (min)
A minute is equal to 60 seconds, a remnant of the ancient Babylonian base-60 (sexagesimal) numeral system. Civilizations such as the Sumerians and Babylonians divided circles, geometry, and time into 60-based increments, an elegant system that persists today in minutes and seconds. Minutes serve as a comfortable human-scale unit—long enough to measure meaningful intervals (such as short tasks or durations in sports) yet short enough to maintain precision in technical contexts. Meteorologists, musicians, aviators, and engineers still rely heavily on minutes because they allow intuitive expression of small-to-medium time spans. Despite its ancient origin, the minute remains an indispensable unit in modern life, reflecting our deep cultural inheritance from early mathematical civilizations.
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.