Are there any “alternative” time systems based on something other than earths rotation, or systems that make more mathmatical sense than the 60 min, 24 hour, 365.25 days method?
From The French Revolutionary Calendar, we learn that during the tenure of the Paris Commune, the:
I’d bet, but I don’t know, that other systems were tried before the present 24 hour arrangement came to prevail.
In fact you might want to peruse Calendars Through The Ages, the mother site for the one linked above.
I created my own in ignorance of anyone else having perhaps done similar things, around 1982. I still relied upon the rotation of the earth and its revolution around the sun, thus giving me necessarily two measures, but except for year everything was based on the day:
no months
anything less than a day is a decimal division of a day.
a milliday is a bit more than a minute
a centimil is a bit less than a second
a deciday is a bit less than 2 1/2 hours
50 centidays (half a deciday) is a bit more than an hour
Specific time is expressed as day.millidays-year
Non-specific (interval) time is expresses in any decimal increment of days.
Years, meanwhile, start 9000 years before 1968 (arbitrary, but it makes all recorded history and the history of agriculture and permanent settlements a positive integer). Years start Dec 21 (winter equinox).
Astronomers use a “julian day” which is a count of days since some epoch.
IBM mainframes count microseconds since Dec-31-1899. They originally thought it was from Jan-01-1900, but they forgot that 1900 was not a leap year.
TAI (time atomic international) counts seconds and is out of sync with our clocks by 20 +/- seconds because they don’t add leap seconds (which the normal clock does about every 18 months).
Julius Caesar designed a calendar with 365.25 days, but Pope Gregory changed that to 265.2425 in 1582.
And the list goes on
Scott Flansburg, the “Human Calculator”, developed a new timekeeping/calender system that makes quite a bit of sense. Thirteen months of four seven day weeks. That way, you still get 365 days per year, but the same date will fall on the same week day every year, and every month starts on the same day of the week. You can find all details at Simple Age.
I can’t find the reference, but I once read of a historical event which happened in Egypt or Babylon several thousand years ago which coincided with an eclipse. Because contemporary scientists have calculated the precise date of that eclipse, this was the earliest event in recorded history which historians know occured on an exact date. I always thought that date would be a culturally neutral date to start an dating system from.
Like AHunter3 said, we’re kinda stuck with the durations of “day” and “year” based on the motion of the Earth, but you can subdivide those astronomical contraints however you want.
Ephemeral time is based on the Moon’s apparent travel around the earth.
Various cultures have their own calender. I think I have heard of Jewish, Chinese, and Korean dates.
In a sense, time today is reckoned most carefully by its defined relationship to the speed of light through the emission of a particular energy state of (I think) Krypton.
In the SAS computer environment, time is reckoned by seconds or days since the beginning of January 1 1960.
Didn’t the Romans or Greeks at one time divide the year into twelve equal portions of 30 days, and turn the remaining 5 or so days into a festival? I know eventually the Romans complicated the months with different lengths as favors to various political celebraties…
I do not know about Romans and Greeks, but other civilizations (Mayans, I dont know if Aztecs, Egyptians), divided their year in 360 days, and added 5 days for festivities. From what I remembered, the Mayans had an 18 month, 20 days each, solar year. They also had a lunar year.
Don’t forget about Swatch’s Internet Time, which is pure metric. 1 day = 1000 units. No time zones. $40 swatch watches to tell you what time it is. Free PalmPilot hacks and a couple of Windows programs are about as far as it’s gotten.
Time based on numbers is usually a white man’s time system.
Indians, for example, base time on events, like say a hunt. So, instead of saying we meet at 2pm white man’s time, they would say we meet at the second moon after the first hunt. Which could be any number of days.
Women on the other hand, have a system whereby time is based around 15 minutes before white man’s time. So, a woman might see three Pm as 2:45. There is discussion of this in a book, Women’s Reality, I believe but I haven’t read it for 18 years.
handy, would that be about 14 years of women’s time?
You ain’t kiddin’. Soon after marriage I noticed Mrs. Mojo’s proclivity that, as soon as the clock hit 2:31, for her it was already 3:00. I thought it was just her private idiosyncrasy.