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Why do we use base 60 for time and base 10 for everything else. Why has no one decided to integrate it.
(self.showerthoughts)
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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While it would he handy to have everything integrated, it's not always vital. We don't need to convert kilograms to seconds very often. Artificially enforced systems have always had trouble replacing older anachronistic ones that are otherwise still useful. Ask people in the UK about their cars' efficiency and you'll often get an answer in miles per gallon.
There's nothing magical about 10, either, other than the accidents of evolution that left us with ten fingers. Base 12 is also extremely convenient, and comes from Sumerians counting with their thumb against each of the three joints on 4 fingers. Go through that process once for each finger on the other hand, and you get 60. And of course, in any industry where things are packed into packages, like nearly everything we buy, dozens fit better than tens. 60 divides very neatly into many convenient and geometrically simple fractions, and a lot of what we do with circles benefits from this.
We probably would have been better standardizing on a base unit that's a power of two, which has more mathematical weight than ten does.
I was writing a reply but you said most of it, so I'll add here. There has also been attempts and/or proposals for decimal time, but the base 12 system is quite rooted. For example during the French revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Thanks! I'll take a look!
Furthermore, there's something to be said for units that are "the right size" as it were. It's hard to measure the distance from your house to the store in parsecs for example, unless you own 1:1 scale copy of the millennium falcon.
A day cycle is a time unit that has been thrust upon us by physics and biology, and we have to then split it into useful segments, and base 10 honestly does a poor job of that. You end up having to describe most things as 0.5 decimal minutes or 2 decimal minutes depending upon how you want to round them, since very few things actual sit close to the amount of time described by 1 decimal minute.
Whether that's because our culture thinks in "minutes" or not is debatable, but the point is that trying to move to such a system is nearly impossible, at least at the moment.
Thanks for your reply! Very interesting!
As you said there is really nothing special about 10 and you could easily redefine prefixes to whatever base you want.
In base 12 a day has 20 hours, an hour has 50 minutes and a week has 120 hours. The numbers are as arbitrary as before. Except the 0th index is always 0 in these cases.
While the origin has been explained well, a base change really doesn't solve the underlying problem with time as we define it. I don't think this has a good solution and probably doesn't need one.