Has anyone ever tried to compute a metric method of keeping time? 365 days = 1 Metric year, 36.5 days = one metric month, and so on. Would there have to be 10 or 100 time zones ? Is our present system of time based on the 365 day year or the 24 hour day ?
The second is the fundamental unit of time. defined here http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictS.html as the fundamental unit of time in all measuring systems. The name simply means that this unit is the second division of the hour, the minute being the first. The second was defined as 1/86 400 mean solar day until astronomers discovered that the mean solar day is actually not constant (see day). The definition was then changed to 1/86 400 of the mean solar day 1900 January 1. Since we can’t go back and measure that day any more, this wasn’t a real solution to the problem. In 1967, scientists agreed to define the second as that period of time which makes the frequency of a certain radiation emitted by atoms of cesium-133 equal to 9 192 631 770 hertz (cycles per second). In other words, if we really want to measure a second, we count 9 192 631 770 cycles of this radiation. This definition allows scientists to reconstruct the second anywhere in the world with equal precision
the day has 24 hours = 86400 s. the tropical year is 365.2422 days approx. because of irregularities in the rotation of the earth leap seconds are inserted or subtracted.
Some sites:
http://www.bsdi.com/date
http://time.greenwich2000.com/index.htm
http://www.nist.gov/
http://www.bldrdoc.gov/timefreq/service/nts.htm
http://www.bldrdoc.gov/timefreq/javaclck.htm
http://www.time.gov/
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/
http://www.usno.navy.mil/
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/time_ann.ram
http://www.amadeus.net/home/worldtime/wt/dst_en.htm
On the other hand, the second doesn’t have to be the fundamental unit. We’re stuck with the number of days in a year, but we could, by convention, divide the day any way we wished. In response to the original poster - yes, many people have. If you point your favorite search engine at “metric time”, you can find many proposals, in varying degrees of seriousness. Many of them are also intertwined with some form of calendar reform.
Swatch has suggested dividing the day into 1000 “beats” and calls their system “internet time” so they can promote their watches marked in it. Personally, I like these guys: http://www.metrictime.org (any group that suggests a unit of “kermits” is OK by me - I suppose next they can divide the year into decimalized “piggies” instead of months, and have the leftover days be called “grouch days”).
Actually, the society I really like for the magnificent futility of their cause is the duodecimal association … if ONLY we had evolved with 6 fingers instead of 5 …
THEN, I’ll tell you why we’d be better off if the byte had been 12 bits instead of 8 …
To save reading all of the threads: The problem with metric time is that it just doesn’t fit with the way the solar system works. If you take the day as the basic unit, then you could use dekadays (10 days) or hectadays (100 days) to replace weeks or months, but the year is still the highy un-metric length of 365.24 days. If you use a year as the basic unit, then you have the problem that no metric division of a year results in an even number of days. A deciyear is 36.52 days, a centiyear is 3.7 days, and a milliyear is a little over 8 hours, 45 minutes. Metric time just doesn’t offer much of an advantage over the system we use now.
You can, however, still divide the day into decimal units instead of hours / minutes / seconds so that you don’t have to fiddle with groups of 60 to see what time it will be in 40 minutes. That is the gist of the swatch marketing stunt proposal and the not-quite-serious “kermits” proposal I mentioned. Won’t happen though.
It may yet. The metric system has caught on well, even though it’s the most contrived and artificial system ever made (no units based on natural landmarks). It’s also the best and most accurate (you can make units of any size for any application, as long as they are a base-10 log 3 distant [1 to 1000, 1000 to 1000000, etc.]). These days, most people use the metric system, the sole outpost of the ‘customary’ system being the USA. And most industries, in this age of globalism, tend toward metric units (car industry, computers, drugs, etc.) simply for convience. So don’t deride a similarly based time system.
Still, a metric day wouldn’t offer any advantages over the base-60 system we use now. And unlike the metric conversions of a century ago, it would be vastly more expensive and require a huge amount of work to pull it off. Think about it: You have to retrain 6 billion people to think in metric time. You have to replace evey watch and clock in existance. Any computer program of any age and any operating platform which mentions time has to be replaced. The effort involved would be mind-boggling, and all for negligible benefits. The whole metric day concept is just change for change’s sake. It wouldn’t offer the same advantages that conversion to metric distance did for other countries.
I seem to recall awhile back hearing about someone (yeah I know, really accurate), that talked about dividing the day into 25 hours instead of 24. This, IMHO, would probably be the easiest way of switching to a somewhat metric time scale. Keep the Weeks, Months, etc… the same, just divide the day into 25 hours and re-calculate the smaller time divisions accordingly.
This would also have a psychological effect on people as well, the 25 hr/day hour would be just a tad bit shorter than a regular hour, but still seem like a regular hour. People would think that they have just a little more time in the day.
We have a duodecimal system of time because the Sumerians counted by counting knuckles on their non-thumb fingers with their thumbs. It had nothing to do with numbers of fingers.
And the French Revolution calander made an attempt at establishing a more metric timescale by declaring that a month consisted of three 10 day weeks. The extra 5 1/4 days were thrown in at regular intervals as “worker’s holidays”
None have been subtracted yet, and there’s not much of a chance that there will be. The reason that the leap seconds are inserted is that the standard day is so much shorter than the actual day.
The earth has gradually slowed over the years, but the irregularites (plus and minus) are a magnitude or more larger–but the standard day was established late in the twentieth century, using a mean day from the start of the century. In the hundred years since, the amount of slow down accumulated is much larger than the irregularities. So, even though the earth occasionally speeds up (inexplicably), we probably will not have to subtract a leap second.
There was a comment several posts back about the metric system being completely arbitrary, ie, not based on natural landmarks. Wasn’t the meter originally based on 1 millionth the distance from the equater to the north pole?
“The metric system is an abstraction whose beauty lies in its indifference to the way human beings actually live their lives or feel comfortable measuring things.”
I wish I could remember the source of this quote.
I remember reading a proposal once to have the year divided into 13 4-week months, with one or two days a year as some sort of international holiday.
I think it started on this message board! The idea was to add on a 13th month (we argued what its name should be, without reaching any conclusion). All of the months except one would be 28 days. One month would have 29 days. A small minority wanted to keep the extra day independent of any month, but most of us thought that that was just silly and interrupted the proper cosmic flow of things (or something like that). On leap years, a second 29-day month would be required, or you could make the odd month 30 days. As for holidays, you’d adjust them based on their position in the 365-day year. For example, Christmas (Dec. 25th) is the 359th day of the year. Assuming for the moment that the new month is placed at the end of the calender, and is the odd 29-day month, then Christmas would fall on the 23rd of the new month.
Actually it was in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, around 10 or 15 years ago.
you couldn’t do that!! If each month only had 28 days what about New Years Eve? No New Years Eve means no New Year. We would just keep repeating the same year over and over again.
Telemark’s right:
What if you lived on another planet – how would you keep time? Presumably if the “day” was really long (e.g., the Moon) then colonists could just keep using the 24 hour system, what with humans having evolved to deal with 24 hour cycles (hmmm, you could send Kansans in space – since they didn’t evolve, they might have some advantages adapting to life on other planets.) But what if you were on a planet that had, say, 22 hour and 14 minute days?
The other thing that worries me about living on other planets is: will Sierra Club let us terraform other planets?
Well, I wasn’t exactly right, but at least I wasn’t completely wrong.
I remember reading about watches built during the time of the French Revolution that had both the 24 hour clock and the decimal time system together. My guess is the people just weren’t on time to a lot of things around then.
Actually, it was invented by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the founder of Positivism, and called the “Positivist Calendar”. Earlier this century, it was popularized by George Eastman (of Kodak) as the “International Fixed Calendar.”
Useful references include–
Steel, Duncan, “Marking Time”
Duncan, David E., “Calendar”
Richards, E.G., “Mapping Time”