Who, how and when decided to count to a second and was like “Yup. This is it. This is a second. This is how long a second is. Everybody on Earth will universally agree that this is how long a second is and use it regardless of culture, origin, intelligence or beliefs”?
In: 1035
Blame the Babylonians. Babylonian mathematics used a base 60 system which means they were all about dividing things into 60 parts. One exception is the division of the day into hours. For whatever reason, they thought 12 daylight hours and 12 hours of night made more sense than splitting the while day 60 ways. For what it’s worth, 12 is 1/5 of 60. Anyway, hours get divided into 60 minutes and each minutes is in turn divided into 60 seconds. As a result, a second is the length it is because it was originally defined as 1/86,400 of a day. Today, a second is more rigorously defined as a specific number of vibrations of a cesium atom but the period of time is still essentially the same
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