Slow slow calcium and other musings...

Recently in lecture we were covering synaptic transmission in the nervous system. Among the multitude of neurotransmitters that endlessly and constantly communicate within the living central nervous system, calcium stands out as the primary mechanism that initiates these turgid bundles of neurotransmitters to expel themselves into the synapse. What I found particularly interesting was that at one moment the professor remarked, "And here is where everything really slows down, calcium must be pumped into the presynaptic terminal where it binds to a calmodulin dependent kinase which leads to a phosphorylation cascade... ultimately on the order of a few milliseconds."
A few milliseconds, slow? This guy must be rough on customer service agents. But then I thought in a relative manner, really if that is slow then what is small? Well I thought if you can't see it, then something is small. What is the smallest thing a human eye can see? I looked it up, I learned something. The way in which the "smallest thing" that can be seen by the human eye gets measured is through a technique of two point discrimination. Two points are placed near each other and when they become close enough such that you can no longer discriminate the two, there you have it, the limits of you perception (more on my limits later). But what is interesting is that the smallest distance (you would think) a human eye can see is not a distance, but a measure of angle. Nifty, two dots a meter apart are easily discriminated at one meter, but not so at 10 kilometers, so the limits of perception are given as an angle, in this case... drum roll please... roughly one arc minute, or one 60th of a degree. What this means is that lets say you are one meter away from a piece of paper, you theoretically could discriminate two points separated by 300 microns (check my math please), or 0.3mm. So that distance, for lack of a better term, is small. Right, right, so bacteria range in that size. Second, isn't interesting that there are ten times the number of bacteria on my skin right now than cells in my body! (not just dirty old me, everybody) Ten times all my cells, true story. So there is "lot" going on of which I'm blissfully unaware. In fact a "lot", is like the professor's use of "slow", there is a microcosmos of activity festering away now on a nanoscale that is too "small" for me to perceive. But it affects us, anyone who has ever had a bacterial infection will confirm that. Think how outlandish, how preposterous, how ignoble germ theory must have been when it was originally conceived, yet how right.
Back to slow. What are the limits of my temporal perception. What is the smallest unit of time between which I can discriminate? I have no idea, I want to say that it is well above a microsecond, and even then I'm being generous, its probably a few milliseconds after five pots of coffee. In a blink of an eye...? yep thats 50 milliseconds. Theoretically, the smallest unit of time in the universe is a Planck unit, the time it takes light to travel one Planck length, brought to us by our beloved master physicist Max Planck whose instructor once dutifully advised the young Max, "don't go into physics because almost everything is already discovered" (man if we only had teachers like this today!! sheesh). Yes this phenomenally small unit of time is roughly 10^-44 seconds. OK do you understand thats like 10^23 zeptoseconds (yes thats a real prefix), a whole mole of zepto seconds!!! Before you stop laughing consider that one Planck unit is also 10^20 yoctoseconds!!! Stop laughing, its ridiculous but true, there is both such a thing as yoctoseconds and God only knows what is happening in the universe from yoctosecond to yoctosecond. Physicists get all hot and bothered when they measure the half-life decay of the helium-9 outer neutron in the second halo to be 7 zeptoseconds, and even then in the blink of eye this decay could have happened 10^18 times, in the blink of an eye. And even then, its not like we can record every yoctosecond for ten minutes and then look back and see what happened, no we can be philisophically aware that a yoctosecond occurred, thats it, but time on that scale has no meaning to us practically, so does that mean its not relevant? There are serious limits to the perception of time imposed by our central nervous system, such that just as absurd as germ theory may have been, what is going on between the milliseconds? What life, energy, or force is happening and on what scale in the between time? To some form of life that exists for only an attosecond (10^-18 seconds), calcium uptake into a presynaptic terminal for one single synaptic transmission would seem like a galactic event, it would seem like billions of years to us residents of a Planckian attosecond universe.
There is so much going on in this world, so much to think about, so much creativity, so many ideas, but only so many yoctoseconds. No matter what your relationship to time, you have got to spend it wisely, get up and be active, think, respond, love and live, because dude if you're LUCKY, you're gonna get eighty years. And thats only like 10^30 zeptoseconds.