Chances are, if you’re British at least, you’ll have heard this phrase before. It’s colloquially used to mean “I’ll be back in a(n arbitrarily) short period of time”. Sure, time is just an illusion and a construct created by humans anyway, but lets gloss over that discussion for right now and think about the phrase itself.
Like many phrases in common use today, there is actually a meaning to the words. To an astrophysicist or quantum physicist (and perhaps others), a jiffy is the time taken for light to travel one femtometre. Fair warning: there’s some basic high school physics involved here – the numbers are a little bigger than you may be used to, but the actual maths being done is very simple. I promise!
Light is quoted as travelling at 299, 792, 458 ms-1 which is really rather quickly – 60 miles per hour is roughly 100 kilometres per hour and roughly 27 metres per second. The speed of light is mind-bogglingly quick. That femtometre we spoke about earlier, is incredibly small. Think about how small one millimetre is compared to one metre. Now imagine taking that tiny fraction of one millimetre, and then doing it again, not once, twice, but FOUR times. There are 1,000,000,000,000,000 femtometres in one metre – that’s a one with 15 zeroes after it.
So the speed of light is so fast that we have no real analogue for it on earth because it appears instantaneous – it only takes about 2.5 seconds to travel from the earths surface to the moon AND back. That’s a round trip of around 768,800 kilometres or 477,700 miles.
So going back to high school physics, speed = distance / time. Rearranging to find time, we get time = distance / speed. Lets you and me plug these numbers into the equation then, 1 x 10-15 m is our one femtometre distance, and our speed of light is roughly 3 x 109 ms-1. This gives us a time of 3 x 10-24 seconds. A very, VERY tiny time. This is to say there are around 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ‘jiffy’s per second.
In the time it actually takes you to say that you’ll be back in a ‘jiffy’, just the word ‘jiffy’, roughly 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 jiffies have actually gone past. Often used to mean “a lot of” something, this is rather more than a ‘buttload’ of jiffies. Wow this getting to be a lot of confusing. So lets move on from time and talk quantities, and loads of butts.
A butt is a type of barrel or cask used to store liquids such as ale (beer) or wine. The quantity of ale contained within a single butt, a single buttload, is equivalent to approximately 108 imperial gallons, 130 US gallons or 491 litres. It was clearly important to have nice, round numbers for these volumetric quantities. I’ve never met anyone who ordered a gallon of ale (imperial or US), or who ordered it by the litre. So in a more familiar unit, that’s 864 pints. Allowing for overfilling to get a reasonable head on each pint, and for various other factors affecting how much liquid can be drawn from the barrel, that’s going to be around 850 “useable” pints of ale in each barrel.
Keeping up so far? We now now how much beer is in a buttload, but don’t know how many loaded butts of beer (in buttloads) we can transport at once. OR how long it would take to drink them, more importantly!
Each pint of beer will weigh approximately 1 lbs (1.043 lbs) or just under 0.5 kg (0.47 kg). So each buttload (excluding the weight of the barrel) will weigh 901 lbs or 409 kg. Assuming an articulated truck and trailer unit, with 6 axles in total, this would reasonably suggest a maximum payload of 28 tonnes, roughly. This gives a total of 68.5 buttloads of beer, excluding the barrels so lets say that’s 67 buttloads of beer allowing the equivalent of 600 kg for the weight of the barrels (butts) themselves. Sound reasonable? Good.
Our 67 buttloads of beer is then almost 57,000 pints of beer. Now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for has come. How many jiffys does it take to drink an articulated truck load of buttloads of beer? Assuming you’re a fast enough drinker to drink a pint of beer every 5 minutes, your lovely landlord has a pint ready for you to pick up as soon as you finished your previous one, you don’t slow down if you eat a bag of crisps or peanuts AND neither of you needs to leave the bar to go to the lavatory (please leave the bar!), it will take almost exactly 197 days and 18 hours to drink all of the beer.
Assuming £3.10 per pint (or $3.10 or €3.10 or whichever currency you prefer to use), it’s going to cost you over 176,500 of your credits of the realm. I can’t afford that personally, but the time it will take in jiffys? I promised I’d do it. Without the (probably to you, but not to me) boring maths, it’s about 6 x 1030 jiffys. That’s a lot of jiffys… Maybe next time we talk about shakes of a lambs tail? Or a moments? I think I better stop there before I get any more carried away than I already am. Thank you so very much for reading and if you have any suggestions, queries, wonderings or questions, please comment below because I’d love to hear from you!