SortStack #1180 — 2029-09-01
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- A mantis shrimp throwing its famous punch 3 ms
The strike accelerates like a bullet and creates collapsing cavitation bubbles that briefly flash with light and heat — prey gets hit twice by one punch.
- One human heartbeat at rest 798 ms
Your heart beats roughly 100,000 times a day and around 3 billion times in a lifetime, pumping enough blood to fill an Olympic pool several times over.
- One swing of a grandfather clock's pendulum 1 sec
A pendulum about one metre long swings in almost exactly one second — a coincidence so neat it was once proposed as the definition of the metre.
- A Formula 1 pit stop to change all four tyres 2 sec
McLaren set the world record at 1.80 seconds in Qatar 2023 — around twenty mechanics working in a window shorter than a heartbeat-and-a-half.
- A proper hand wash, by WHO guidelines 19.8 sec
The recommended scrub lasts about as long as singing 'Happy Birthday' twice — most people manage barely a third of it.
- One full rotation of the London Eye 30 min
It moves so slowly — about 0.9 km/h — that it usually doesn't stop to let passengers on; you simply step into the moving capsule.