Splitting the second: Designing a physics course with an emphasis on timescales of ultrafast phenomena

Timescales spanning 24 orders of magnitude smaller than one second can be studied experimentally, and each range is packed with different physical phenomena. This rich range of timescales offers a great context for an innovative undergraduate physics course which introduces modern physics and technology from an unconventional perspective. Based on the author’s experience in lecturing on these topics to different audiences, this paper proposes a syllabus of a semester-long timescale-based undergraduate physics course.