My first thought was the rather obvious; "not much". Pondering it further I supposed i'm thinking of a second very much on a human level. Love at first sight perhaps? It's not something I subscribe to, but maybe that's just me rather than the idea that it never happens. A blink of an eye takes about a third of second so I could get three of those in. The normal resting heart rate for a person is 70 beats per minute, so I could get a heartbeat in or do some exercise or get unnecessarily worried about get in a couple. I suspect I can snap my fingers a few times in a second.
What about animals? The fastest animal is the Peregrine Falcon which could move over one-hundred metres in a second. I do wonder whether my maths is right on that one. It seems awfully fast.
Moving onto non-meat based things the fastest computer (the Roadrunner) can process an astonishing quadrillion calculations in a second. A quadrillion? Well, that's 1,000,000,000,000,000. I can't fathom such a number. To count from one to one quadrillion at one number a second would take - wait for it - 30,800,000 years. You may be interested to know that a Quadrillion Seconds has a name. A Petasecond. Whilst i'm on that topic (but off the main topic) the name for the longest number of seconds is Yottaseconds (32 quadrillion seconds). Just so you know that a Yottasecond is the length of the half-life of Bismuth. In case you were wondering.
The fastest thing in the universe is light - probably (some Italian scientists have speculated that perhaps Einstein could be wrong, but that's another topic). In a second (in a vacuum) light would 299,792 kilometers, or 186,282.112 miles.
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