Reposting bc I dun goofed before
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Why would metric time still use the same seconds? Surely it'd be a different unit that was a nice multiple of 10
Thr second is already a metric SI unit. A day happens to be 86.4 kiloseconds. I'm not sure why that is weird.
Redefining the second would be a lot of work for no real benefit.
Hours, days, weeks are not metric, you wouldn't really say kiloday or centiday.
There was an attempt originally, 100 seconds a minute, 100 minutes an hour and 10 hours a day, but it never stuck
French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds (100000 decimal seconds per day)
We're looking at this the wrong way. The problem is the number of seconds not dividing neatly into the period of the day. You're right, adjusting the length of a second is impractical, so let's look at our other options here.
The main issue is that the length of a day is not actually constant. Leap second occur (in either direction) which mean that a day is sometimes one second shorter or longer. Timezones and DST also can make a day a whole hour longer or shorter.
Seconds are a unit for physical measurement. They're always the same length. Minutes, days, weeks, months, years, etc are imprecise shortcuts that are convenient for our society but this convenience sometimes comes at the price of being bonkers units from the physics standpoint.
Oh, so you are saying that overhauling a system that has been used for millennia in favor of one that is a bit more logical for niche cases isn't worth it on large scales?
Saying that the metric system is a bit more logical than imperial units for niche cases is like saying that LeBron James is slightly better than my 70yo mom at very specific aspects of basketball 🙄
60 is good because you can divide it by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 which is convenient
I'll switch to metric when we adopt dozenal numbers, and not a moment sooner
Compared to 100 which can only be divided by 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50. Not too bad, but not as good.
With circles being 360 degrees, the base12 is cooler
idk what you mean, circles are 2π radians
yeah, lets all start counting in base-60
I'll start by counting to ten
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω ϟ 10
Exactly RuneScape ticks are where it's at, there are 100 ticks in a minute
(Slaps clock) This baby can fit so many prayer flashes! 😎
deconds
😋 cute hahaha
Huh? What are you talking about? What would a second be a multiple of?
Nanoseconds, milliseconds, picoseco….
You could change the length of a second so a day is 100 kilo seconds for instance.
Much like other imperial measurements the length of a second is arbitrary.
The second is actually the most fundamental unit of the metric system. For example, a metre is defined by how far light travels on some fraction of a second.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium_standard
You can just change that, though, so long as the change is consistent. All units of measurement are human constructs, and definitely aren't immutable.
The length of a day is variable. You would have to update the second (and every unit derived fro It) after every big earthquake, and a thousand other events.
The solar system does not give a shit about your preference for base 10 numbers there will always be (roughly) 365.25 rotations per revolution and you don’t get a choice about that.
Exactly. You don't get very far at all before perfectly natural divisions of time can't divide evenly by 10. You can't "fix" it, like you can with mass or length, unless you demand people give up on centering time around astronomical events. The second is an SI unit. Science can be done in seconds. Anything else just shifts the awkwardness of orbital mechanics elsewhere, while pissing everyone off.
Can you explain this argument to me.
The second is currently a fixed length, there's a fixed amount in the day and we don't adjust it now.
So how would it be any different if we changed the amounts?
My main point is that you've done nothing but kick the can down the road a little bit, so people decided it wasn't worth the trouble. It's annoying that there 60 seconds in a minute, 1800 in an hour, ~86k in a day, fair enough. Let's say you make a new metric second that has 100k in a day. You make certain things easier, but how are you keeping time on anything like a larger scale?
You can probably come up with something fairly usable with ten-day weeks, but what about years? This is is where it breaks down. A year is based on astronomical events, but different ones than a day, both are deeply ingrained into the routines of life. It is 365 and a a quarter (-ish) days in a year. We're stuck with that, unless you just want a number that has no useful context for humans after a few years. Throw in that you also have leap seconds to add every so often, and in the end it's still going to be a mess of decimal units that go unused, and customary units that will not be given up, but with all the drama of making a change.
There is no single bandaid to pull off, so it's not the obvious improvement that other weights and measures are, because time is more fundamentally rooted in our experience as animals than what we label a given amount of stuff.
Decimal time works perfectly. For years, as you say, you are stuck by how long a year is. All you can do here is better divide the months. 13 x 28 days is my preference.
Due to tidal forces, the length of a day is constantly trending longer. Also, the moon is slowly drifting away from the earth for the same reason and lunar months are also getting longer.
So, no, the day hasn't been and will not always be the same length.
It isn't in our current system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
"The second [...] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.[1]"
Those definitions are picked to be as immutable, unambiguous and easily replicated in a lab as possible, but have nothing to do why a second is defined like that.
But did you know that if you tie exactly 1m of string to some heavy object, it will swing once per second?