I'm trying to get back into being more active beyond my own postings these days =D I noticed the quality of content seems to be thriving... seemingly better than latter Steem days.
Yes this is true, although the Steem bar was pretty low (I will always remember the banana story, one of the greatest moments of the good old Steem chat :D )
Well, since you work on such tiny timescales you presumably have extremely sensitive equipment to measure such things, combined with a lot of maths. But how short a timescale can particle physics currently, and usefully, work with? Close to Planck time?
Or, am I getting it wrong, and these timescales are only derived from maths?
Those tiny time scales are in fact too small to be observed. From the electronic point of view, everything happens as instantaneous. What we actually see is the decay products of the top quarks and antiquarks. However, measuring the properties of these decay products allows us to conclude very solidly that we had intermediate top quarks and antiquarks in the process.
For that reason, we are very far from the Planck scale and not even close to it. The time scales there are predictions from quantum field theory (which be seen sometimes as math ;) ).