Convert Shake (shake) to Planck Time (tₚ) instantly.
About these units
Shake (shake)
A shake is a playful but scientifically important unit equal to 10 nanoseconds. It originated in the Manhattan Project, where physicists needed a convenient term for very short intervals in nuclear chain reactions. A nuclear fission event occurs on the order of a few shakes, making the unit ideal for modeling neutron capture, reaction propagation, and weapon physics. Today, the shake appears in nuclear engineering literature, plasma physics, and astrophysics—any field involving extremely rapid events. Despite its whimsical name, the shake represents a meaningful scientific compromise: short enough for nuclear events, yet still relatable and easy to calculate.
Planck Time (tₚ)
Planck time is the smallest meaningful unit of time in known physics, defined as the time it takes light to travel one Planck length. It equals approximately 5.39 × 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds. Below the Planck time, current theories of spacetime—General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics—break down, and we enter a regime where quantum gravity dominates. Planck time defines the theoretical boundary of the earliest moments of the universe, immediately after the Big Bang, before classical spacetime emerged. It is not a unit we can measure directly; rather, it represents a fundamental limit set by nature's constants, including the speed of light, the gravitational constant, and Planck's constant. The Planck time is the frontier where physics transitions from the known into the speculative—where time itself may become granular, discontinuous, or fundamentally different from the human conception.