An event like a "protein folding" can take milliseconds, in a tube [1]. While atomic/biophysical/biochemical simulations have time-steps of femto-seconds.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFcp2Xpd29I
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3890418/
"Traditional MD [Molecular Dynamics (protein folding)] simulations are limited in length by timestep limits. Studies by our group and others have shown that traditional MD is limited to timesteps of about 2 fs due to high-frequency resonance frequencies.1–3 Many biologically relevant motions occur on the microsecond to millisecond range, which is 9 to 12 orders of magnitude greater than the timesteps possible with traditional MD. Further, each step requires a costly force calculation (O(N) to O(N2)). As such, simulating medium-size proteins often requires months of computer time on a large distributed cluster such as Folding@home4,5 to simulate milliseconds of dynamics, while simulating a large protein (e.g. the β-2 Adrenergic Receptor) on biologically-relevant time scales (milliseconds through hours) using a standard desktop computer would take years. Thus, it is not feasible to simulate timescales of biological interest without substantial advances in MD methods."
12 orders of magnitude of difference in time is akin to the difference between causal events happening once per millisecond and those happening once per century. How do you show a movie capturing the nuance of someone's blink reflex, along with their birth life and death...