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
I think the responses are missing the heart of your question.
You’re NOT asking how do we make sure that the second is standardized.
What i think you’re really asking is, how did we choose the length of the second such that the day is evenly divided by 86400 seconds. The answer is, we didn’t. We didn’t choose a second first. Like another commenter said, we chose hours first. We didn’t initially have seconds, we had hours, then minutes, then seconds.
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