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
Originally? They used a sundial. A second was 1/60 of a minute. Which was 1/60 of a hour. And an hour was 1/12th of the time from sunrise to sunset on the equinox.
The babylonians loved 12 and 60 (and 360) because it made trigonometry not need a lot of fractions. Plus they can be easily divided into whole numbers.
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