It seems like everything with our calendar is based around 24hr days and the number of 24hr days to revolve around the sun. But a 24hr day can be broken down to 1,440 minutes and in turn 86,400 seconds. How did we (humans) calibrate the second so that exactly 86,400 would be 1 rotation of the earth to the point where we never need something like a “leap second” like we have with leap years?
In: Planetary Science
The second was initially defined to be a specific fraction of a day. When we got better and better mechanical ways of measuring seconds, we just built that in. More recently, it became more important to have the second have a constant definition, rather than tied to earth’s rotation rate. But it’s still really close.
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