OK…I have been thinking about it and need to know how and why it happened. Why and how did we get to have 24 hours in a day, and then 60 mins in an hour and then 60 secs in a minute? The concept of 1 year is comprehensible - I guess some bright and humble soul(possibly Egyptian? since they are the ones who spent a lot of time looking at the sky?) sometime in the past realized that planetary positions had a repetetive nature. So the time it took for all the stars in the sky to exactly in the same spot again, he called it 1 year. I can also perhaps understand the concept of 1 day. Same logic as before except that instead of the stars, this time around he decided to look at the sun. So far so good…my guess that is. This soul also wanted to divide that 1 day into smaller units perhaps. And now my brain decides to take a walk. What made him choose the weird figure of 24 units to divide the day? Why not a better and nice looking figure of say 10, or 25 or 100 or whatever? Further, why choose the figure of 60 to divide that 1 hour further into minutes? Having decided on that weirdo figure of 24, why not stick with it again and divide the hour into 24 minutes and the minute into 24 secs. Wouldn’t that be logically simpler? Why this fetish to intentionally defy Occam’s razor?
And finally if that makes sense why don’t change and adopt a simpler system now hust as we decided to go metric?
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/C/CA/CALENDAR.htm
Everything you always wanted to know about our modern means of counting time and more - much, much more.
Here’s an easier to understand site:
Twelve is actually a very useful number as a basis for an everyday system, one which involved frequent mental arithmetic - it divides into 2, 3, 4 and 6. And 24 divides into 8. On the other hand, 10 only divides into 2 and 5.
ouldn’t that be logically simpler? Why this fetish to intentionally defy Occam’s razor?
Can you imagine the complexity of that?
I am sorry but I do not understand how it is “logically” simpler. How does a number that divides into more numbers have anything to do with choosing that number to divide a day into? What and where is the benefit?
Despite the initial problems we did change to metric for linear measurements, didn’t we? Why didn’t we also apply a similar reasoning to linear measurements? Like having 24 centimeters in a meter and 60 millimeters in a centimeter.
Thanks for the links. That answers my initial question of when and who did it. But what I wonder is what went on in the minds, their logic and reasoning into choosing such numbers of 24 and 60.
Many people assume that ten is somehow a magic number. Not so.
We apparently settled on ten for our number system base, or radix, becuase we happen to have ten fingers and ten toes.
Some ancient groups counted in sixes and twelves. Now why did they pick such a “silly” number? They didn’t count fingers, but rather the spaces betwee them. You have one on the outside of your thumb, two between the thumb and index finger, three between index & middle finger, four between middle and ring finger, five between ring and little finger, and six on the outside of your little finger.
Thatr’s just as logical as the system we use.
There are legitimate mathematical advantages to using twelve rather than ten as the radix. As we become more computerized, even base sixteen has some value. Ten is acutally a pretty lousy choice of radix. But, like so many cultural things, they just happened that way and now we’re pretty well stuck with them.
It’s crucial to remember that the Egyptians didn’t handle fractions the way we do. Their method is still called Egyptian fractions.
A culture disposed to thinking in unit fractions would naturally be guided to numbers that could be divided evenly by many others.
The changeover to the metric system and the resistance to changing to metric time is dealt with in a number of books. A fairly good recent one is the Poincare half of Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time, by Peter Louis Galison.
So, here you are on the Straight Dope Message Board, and y’all give links to various explanations, and no one searches the Archives to see what Cecil has to say: Who decided the day should be divided into 24 hours?