how many milliseconds make up one second?

Have you ever paused to consider how long a millisecond is? It's a unit of time that many of us take for granted, yet one second is comprised of 1000 milliseconds (ms). That's right—one second and one thousandth of a second are incredibly close in terms of duration.

It can be easy to lose sight of just how small a millisecond actually is. To put that into context, one second is equal to 0.001 minutes or 0.0001 hours, so it takes a thousand milliseconds just to complete a single second. While it might not seem like much, this makes all the difference when measuring events that occur with lightning speed. As an example, let's look at processors in computers; they use millisecond-based measurements to calculate instructions at a speed as quick as one nanosecond per second (1 ns/s). Without understanding milliseconds, these calculations would be much more complex.

Milliseconds are also useful for measuring human reaction times accurately. For example, research suggests that our inner mechanisms have an average response time of roughly 200 ms. That's roughly the duration between the presentation of an auditory cue and the involuntary startle response it triggers in most people—a process that comprises virtually no conscious thought or effort from our end but requires precise timing from the science community when studying such phenomena.

See more about milliseconds to seconds