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SÚTRA 40.
171
aeons, avasarpini and utsarpini, each consisting of 413452630308203177749512192000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000 (77 digits) solar years. (The Brahma kalpa of Hindus also cosists of 77 digits but the digits do not agree.)
Then there are intermediate units of every day use.
... Thus time as an independent reality is established on modern evidence.
ical.
SUTRA 40. सोऽनन्तसमयः ॥४०॥
SO ANANTA-SAMAYAH [40] (An infinitesimal fraction of time is called the samaya.)
This sütra defines the unit of time. Just as paramāņu is the unit of mass space-point or the pradeśa, the unit of three-dimensional space, similarly a samaya is the unit of time and is defined as the time taken by a paramāņu to traverse one spacepoint or the time taken in going from one kälaņu to another. Since there is only one kālāņu in each space-point, the two definitions are identical.
In the words of the 1946 Nobel Prize Winner Physicist, P.W. Bridgeman "We cannot think of an interval of time as the sum of moments without duration."
Physicists began to deal with ultra short time intervals after the discovery of radioactivity. Some types of atoms had short life. Polonium-212 for instance, has a half life of less than a millionth (10) of a second. It decayed in the time it took the earth to travel one inch in its 18/2 mile per second
the sun. Some sub-atomic particles break down in far shorter intervals of time. In a bubble chamber, certain particles, travelling at nearly the speed of light, manage to form tracks three centimeters long after forming and before breaking down. This corresponds to a life time of a ten billionth (10 ) of a second.
In the 1960s, particularly short-lived particles were discovered whose half life period was (1023) seconds i.e., ten
