– Why is time measured in multiples of 60? Wouldn’t a base 10 form of measurement make more sense in applications like physics?
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It used to be we measured things in all sorts of units that were weird multiples of each other, often 12 or some multiple of 12. Then people decided that using base 10 units that were all clear multiples of each other would make things much easier and over time most of the world switched to those units.
Time was the only thing that was left out. Some people tried to create metric time units nut those didn’t stick.
Part of it is that the tradition was just to ingrained and another was that there simple is no good way to quantify time when our main every day reference point of days and years won’t fit into such a system at all.
A year has about 365.24 days and a year has about 12.37 lunar cycles and a lunar cycles has about 29.53 days.
There is no good way to twist that into powers of ten, but if you squint a bit you can sort of see a year with 360 days, a month with 30 days and 12 month to a year. It is not entirely correct but it is sort of close.
Using multiples of 12 and 60 and 360 really works out way.
It works out especially well if you like a world where fractions aren’t invented or widely used yet.
You can evenly divide 12 in halves, thirds, quarters and sixth.
With 60 you can evenly divide that by even more numbers: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and 360 get you 8 & 9 and 45 and 40 additionally.
That is useful.
Many ancient pre-metric units of measurements followed that pattern (some were just thrown together from disparate unrelated units that were made to “fit”)
Even currency followed that pattern. (The weird money system that wizards use in Harry Potter is not a strange fantasy quirk made up by the Author but a parody of the actual money system of pounds, shillings and pence that was used in Britain until the 1970s)
Most units were replaced by better decimal units in most of the world.
Time manged to escape that switch.
One other point where multiples of 60s stayed the norm are degrees of a circle and coordinates based on that
While multiple system of describing angles exist, the one where a circle is 360° is still the most common. Traditionally each degree of a circle is subdivided in 60 minutes each minute into 60 seconds just like with the units of time.
For example the location of the Statue of Liberty can be written as:
40° 41′ 21″ N, 74° 2′ 40″ W
(40 degree 41 minutes 21 seconds North and 74 degrees, 2 minutes and 40 seconds west.)
A metric version of that is: 40.689167, -74.044444 (this may be too many decimal places for such a large object, but I have it from wikipedia.)
So anyway, everything used to be measured like we still do time and we never managed to quite switch away from that.
At this point all our other units are based on multiplying meters, kilogram and seconds (and ampere) with each other. So unless we anted to redefine all units like Watt Joule, Ohm, volt and many, many others we are stuck with the second as it is and the number of seconds in a day is simply not a power of ten and a having a unit of time that would have a day as 84.6 kiloseconds would be not very useful in every day life.
I want you to take a look at your hand.
Using your thumb count the number of finger bones.
Through this method you can count to 12 on one hand.
Back in the the time when the Sumerians were still around thousands of years ago, this was a popular way of counting on your finger.
It’s why the dozen is still a popular count, the Egyptians did similar things, that’s why there’s 12 hours of day, and 12 hours of night.
Now think back to kindergarten and the way you were taught to count with your fingers.
This method of counting with your fingers was also popular with people in the same area.
So say you want to compromise between these two.
Well you could count the number in the current dozen with one hand, and count the number of dozens with the other hand using the kindergarten method.
5 x 12 = 60.
That’s one story at least.
The issue is that all of this is happening so far back in history that it’s impossible to know for sure.
And it’s possible the counting style went back and forth, and different people came up with the same thing for different reasons.
It doesn’t help that 60 has an unusually large number of things that divide it,so maybe it was all sorts of different systems colliding, and all coming up with 60 because it was so divisible.
The division of an hour into minutes and seconds was made by Al-Biruni, one of the greatest scholars in the world. And he was very familiar with the sexagesimal numbers as used by the babilonians and persians. So he chose to use it for the divisions of the hour. The number 60 is extremely divisible. You can divide it by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20 and 30. For example 100 can not be divided by 3 or 8. It is only later that the decimal system have gained a lot of popularity.
Also there’s caesium-133 which has a number of periods of radiation between some levels which correspond to a second.
It’s been tried before. I believe the French tried it for a while. Pretty sure they were the most recent. It just doesn’t really work. Nature dictates the rules, we just fit our ideas around it.
The real question is why aren’t we using a base 12 numbering system for everything else? Because it makes a lot more sense when you really look into it. Obviously is because we have ten digits (fingers), and things grew from there.
Well you are right. The issue is some ass fucker in an ancient civilization chose that base 6 was a good number system and decided to fuck us all. It’s is the same reason circles are 360 degrees. There is no reason is should be base 6 save that they said so.
Because you often need fractions of one hour. One third of 60 is 20, one third of 100 is 33 1/3, which isn’t very useful.
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