The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

To catch a glimpse of the subatomic world’s unimaginably fleet-footed particles, you need to produce unimaginably brief flashes of light. Anne L’Huillier, Pierre Agostini, and Ferenc Krausz have shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in developing the ability to illuminate reality on almost inconceivably brief timescales.

Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, the three physicists developed techniques for producing laser pulses lasting mere attoseconds—periods billions of billions of times briefer than a second. When viewed in such short flashes, the world slows down. The beat of a hummingbird’s wings becomes an eternity. Even the incessant