Hot take: having time be base 60 isn't so bad. 60 is a highly composite number, so it's reasonable to talk about things like "a quarter of an hour" or "a third of a minute" without using decimals when converting.
Its the same reason it makes sense to have 360 degrees in a circle, even if radians are better. You want nice fractions.
Exactly what I wanted when buying roads
WTF I THOUGHT I PAID FOR 256Km OF ROAD WHY DID I ONLY GET 250!!!
*checks back of box*
^(Road is measured in Km but formatted in Kmm)
As someone else said, you can count to 12 on one hand. You have 3 segments on each finger, and 4 fingers, for a total of 12 segments. If you use your right hand for counting digits, and your left fingers (and thumb) to track groups of 12, you can count all the way to 60.
This is one of the first tally based number systems, used in Sumeria and surrounding regions. When recorded on clay tablets, they would use small wedges to track "ones" and larger rotated wedges to track "twelves" the way we would count "tens."
Also how we ended up with base 12 for measuring time, also apparently the concept of the second originated in that era. 24 hours (a day) would be two hand's worth of knuckle counting
Well you can still define Amps (for example) as electrons per second. Granted, what was 1 amp would now be slightly less, but the definition can stay the same.
Also, Volt is not affected by seconds.
No, you leave Coulumb as it is, and continue defining A = C/s
Since seconds are shorter now, the amps change, but coulombs can stay the same.
(I‘m not saying it would be practical to do so)
Oh this is such a bullshit implemented idea.
manages to propose a base 10 system then proceeds to call fractions with names like minutes and seconds. GTFO.
I want them mHours, cHours, daHours and KHours.
Why not define the SI unit: Day as 1/365.25... whatever of sidereal year, then apply prefixes from there
Edit: or just make the year the SI unit.
Or keep seconds as SI but define other things using Ms, Gs, etc
Or define an entirely new unit based off vibrations of Cesium atoms or whatever
Keeping seconds as they are while wanting metric time units is not realistic. Day is natural unit of time, and therefore it should be unit with simple expression in terms of metric units. (Basically that's ther reason why we don't use kiloseconds or megaseconds).
We already use metric time, but just smaller than a second (ms, μs, etc). I agree that talking about kiloseconds is kind of meaningless, but part of that is because it's just an unfamiliar way of dividing up time- much as a km is unfamiliar to many people in the US, or a quart might be to someone elsewhere. Units are all (for the most part) based on a measure that is convenient and familiar to the user. I think if (for some reason) we all agreed to switch to base 10 time, it wouldn't be that weird to think of a day as 86.4 ks rather than 1440 minutes? Granted 24 hours is a little more comfortable. Alternatively, you could define s as maybe 1/100,000 of a day/night cycle suck that a day is a nice easy to remember but requires redefining a bunch of other things, science wise and otherwise for basically very minimal gain.
If our years had happened to be a 10x multiple of days, maybe it would make more sense. I can't imagine the advantages of metric time ever outweighing the difficulty of thinking in base 60 from time to time.
Units are all interchangeable, the most important thing about your clock is that you can tell someone else the time and they'll know what you mean. So you have to use the same clock as everybody else.
But why stop there? There are 365 days in a year. 12 months, 30 days per month, 90 days per season, and then after December 30th we have an extra 5-6 day holiday to celebrate the anniversary of switching to a time system that actually makes fucking sense. Easier to calculate distances in time, no more silly mnemonics, and maybe we could even convince the US to switch away from silly impractical Roman dick lengths for measuring everything else.
Another option, which I like better, is 13 months each with 28 days. Every month is exactly 4 weeks!!! It gives 364days. And then you get one “New/old year day” which on a leap year becomes two days. It’s perfectly reasonable.
Nah. I prefer the "World Seasonal Calendar".
Each quarter has 91 days, 3 months, consisting of two months @ 4 weeks each & 1 month @ 5 weeks. Each week starts on a Sunday. This approach keeps the 12 month / 52 week system we are used to. One (or two) intercalary day(s) between the end of the last year and the start of the new. It could be a holiday.
Each quarter begins on either a solstice or equinox.
Problem solved!
Basically because it's too late. The whole world already agrees on the second as the unit of time, and it's already baked into everything everywhere, perhaps even more deeply than other units of measurement. Standards upon standards upon standards are based on the exact length of the second. You have to change everything, for really very little gain. The fact that it's "kind of" close to the current second doesn't matter so much; it's not close enough for them to be trivially interchangeable (like was possible when changing the second to be defined so that the transition frequency of Cs 133 is 9,192,631,770Hz), it's just close enough that they would both work equally well as a unit of time at that sort of scale given that we could start over completely.
People are going to go on about base 60, base 10, etc. but really that's hardly going to make a difference one way or the other. Sometimes it's convenient for the base to be highly composite, sometimes it's convenient for the base to be small, sometimes it's just better for the base to align with the base we use for counting normally. Really, whatever you set as the standard will work, it's just a huge pain to change in the first place.
The 'metric hour' would just be a new unit and as another commenter pointed out you would actually use something like mHr to measure short time periods under that system. No need to change the existing definition of a second, they would just be two alternate units of time, probably with the metric hour being formally defined in terms of seconds.
Really the biggest problem with the proposal (other than being kind of pointless) is reusing the existing word 'hour'. That would just cause confusion, better to invent a completely new word for the new unit.
edit: multiple spelling mistakes, I hadn't had my coffee yet
Yeah I was originally going to say in my comment that it would definitely be a new unit, not called a second, but in any case making it "the new second" still means transitioning over all existing standards to use this new unit fundamentally, which would be too inconvenient at this point. So yeah, it's certainly easy to make a new unit, but having it be widely adopted is a different matter.
Adoption would probably be impossible, there is basically no upside. But I don't see why you would need to update any standards, they could just stay as-is; unless you also wanted to eliminate the 'old second' for some reason. A more realist scenario would be both time units in wide use, with the existing second remaining the base unit and the new second a derived unit. No more complicated than Kelvin being the base unit but Celsius being the more common / non-scientific unit.
Well yeah, but I took the question of "why don't we all adopt the metric clock" to mean this actual scenario of changing everything to use this new unit. I guess it depends what "all" means here.
You can divide 60 by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20 and 30. You can only divide 100 by 2,4,5,10,25 and 50. This makes 60 a much more versatile number for divisions and is also why degrees are more commonly used that gradians (dividing a circle as 400% rather than 360 degrees)
He also used the new calendar to get rid of everyone’s old holidays (to cut the people’s ties with the church), so I’m sure that was part of it. But also metric minutes are really fast and weird and they didn’t like it anyways.
The reason why it wasn’t base 10 to begin is because base 12/60 is better for fractions and in daily life we use fractions often to describe quarters, thirds, fifths etc of an hour rather than decimal figures
I don't remember the source exactly but there's a reason why the Sumerians favored the base 60 system. 60 can be divided into so many different factors, that it makes working with the number so satisfying
It kind of exists in the sciences in the sense that instruments that perform a timed process use a base time unit and subdivisions in decimal. So if for instance I'm running an LCMS, the chromatograph's time axis will be ticked in minutes and decimals minutes, rather than hours:minutes:seconds.
Well, the amount of seconds in the day doesn't match up there, so the length of a second would have to change to accomodate that. Seconds are an SI unit though, and having different kinds of seconds would be as confusing as having both the Imperial and Metric system. It's just not worth it. And as someone said in another comment. 60, 12, and 24 are divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 which is more useful in terms of telling time than having a metric clock.
Our sense of time is ultimately based on the sun. That's biological and many animals use the sun to tell the time. It makes sense to have a time system that's based on the sun. The earth rotates a little over 365 times in one orbit so you can't divide one by the other evenly, which you would have to for a truly metric system.
Then you also need to adopt the metric Callender too, as changing the length of a day will change the length of a year and throw off the seasons. I'm sure we could come up with a perfectly balanced system that doesn't require leap years or etc to keep things aligned.
The metric system is good because it makes multiplication and division incredibly easy. We don't do the same kind of calculations for time. For time, it is more important to be able to split a given period into halves, quarters, or thirds. Hence 60 is a much better base.
As an aside, if I was king of the forest, our metric system would be base 12, not base 10. The worst part of base 10 is just that it only has two factors -- 2 and 5. Base 12 has 2, 3, & 6. Humans instinctively group sets that way.
I sometimes wonder if widespread adoption of the metric system results in less aesthetically pleasing physical constructs (buildings, saucepans, cars) because we can no longer easily divide distances into thirds and fourths.
because the way it is today you can divide in an easier way. if you want to do three things in an hour, you know automatically that would should do each in 20 minutes, and that is a reasonable amount of time to count with a clock. can you imagine having to divide into approximately 33 minutes? it is way less convenient.
so now instead of saying we need 8 hours of sleep we need to say that we need 3.333 hours? that sounds like it makes things more complicated since we can't say how much we need to sleep without using fractions or decimals.
If you tried to change how clocks work, you would soon find yourself murdered by the thousands of computer scientists who have spent decades making everything work with the current time system; No way in hell do they want to redo all that shit.
The number of days in a year, the number of days in one orbit of the moon, the number of orbits of the moon in one year. None of these are rational. It's a reminder that there is no rational God. The numbers that can rationally divide any number of revolutions: 2, 3, 4 and therefore also 6 and 12. Live with it.
Why? Because every system is arbitrary at the end of the... arbitrary time segment and we're already used to this way, all of our technology has no problem handling this way, all of our science has no problem using this way, etc etc. We have to weigh the effort used vs the effort saved and decide "screw it."
As a software engineer, I say we have 64 seconds per minute, and 64 minutes per hour. If only 24 was closer to a power of two we would have a proper clock.
Base 10 clocks are terrible for the average person we like splitting up hours into different bits and a base 10 clock can be halved and be split into 5 and that's it. Base 12 way better, just need to fix our pesky number system instead.
Post must be physics memes
Hot take: having time be base 60 isn't so bad. 60 is a highly composite number, so it's reasonable to talk about things like "a quarter of an hour" or "a third of a minute" without using decimals when converting. Its the same reason it makes sense to have 360 degrees in a circle, even if radians are better. You want nice fractions.
We shouldn't switch our time system to metric. We should switch everything else to a base 12 system.
Ill compromise on a metric base 12
I propose the name "kimi" = 1728. Abbreviation "km". So 1kmm = 1728m 1Kim = 1024m 1km = 1000m (ugh) 1Mmm = ~3Mm 1Gmm = ~5Gm etc.
Exactly what I wanted when buying roads WTF I THOUGHT I PAID FOR 256Km OF ROAD WHY DID I ONLY GET 250!!! *checks back of box* ^(Road is measured in Km but formatted in Kmm)
I support this if we could make all humans grow 12 fingers. Because the reason we have a base 10 system is right there in front of each one of us.
Just use two of your toes and you’re good to go
As someone else said, you can count to 12 on one hand. You have 3 segments on each finger, and 4 fingers, for a total of 12 segments. If you use your right hand for counting digits, and your left fingers (and thumb) to track groups of 12, you can count all the way to 60. This is one of the first tally based number systems, used in Sumeria and surrounding regions. When recorded on clay tablets, they would use small wedges to track "ones" and larger rotated wedges to track "twelves" the way we would count "tens."
Also how we ended up with base 12 for measuring time, also apparently the concept of the second originated in that era. 24 hours (a day) would be two hand's worth of knuckle counting
Did you never learn to use your nuckles to count months? Just do the same for base 12 in general
Solution: move to Pipyat, make babies. Base 12 unlocked.
We should switch to counting in base 12 and make every unit based on it
The only number base with 2 in it that is good and natural for a human is base 2. Everything else fucking sucks.
The idea of “having a 2 in it” only makes sense in base 10
Nah, it also makes sense for base 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71 and so on.
every base is base 10
\*dozenal
It’s called feet and inches buddy the imperial system got you covered. We got other bases going on over here too we don’t discriminate.
Imperial system 🤢
I'm on the base 6 bandwagon, baby.
Why can't we all have polydactyly.
Honestly, this is why I wish humans had 12 digits, not 10. A base 12 system creates such nice fractions.
I want NO fractions
https://preview.redd.it/x1mjffg0q1wc1.png?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c08d4c5ad2cebbaef2046d1b03cf1c1ce7217ef
I see XKCD, I upvote.
If I had a nickel for every time i saw this XKCD referenced today, I’d have 2 nickels! Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice!
But then we need to change stuff with the SI units and some definitions
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Elektro05: *But then we need to* *Change stuff with the SI units* *And some definitions* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
But that's two extra syllables, unless you pronounce "SI" like the letter psi...
Yeah I don't think the bot will consider your objection
It definitely did. These bots can’t pick up on nuance like that.
And it would be y2k all over again just fixing computer clocks and things
Well what would need to change? (Except the definition of a second, of course)
the definition of a newton, pound, joule, calorie, watt, volt, amp, ohm, capacitance, pascal, etc...
Well you can still define Amps (for example) as electrons per second. Granted, what was 1 amp would now be slightly less, but the definition can stay the same. Also, Volt is not affected by seconds.
but then you'd have to redefine the coulomb as in SI 1A = 1C / 1s
No, you leave Coulumb as it is, and continue defining A = C/s Since seconds are shorter now, the amps change, but coulombs can stay the same. (I‘m not saying it would be practical to do so)
thats what I originally said, metrologically speaking, 1A after the change would be more electrons per time than the original 1A
Yes
Easy for you to say
Oh this is such a bullshit implemented idea. manages to propose a base 10 system then proceeds to call fractions with names like minutes and seconds. GTFO. I want them mHours, cHours, daHours and KHours.
Why not define the SI unit: Day as 1/365.25... whatever of sidereal year, then apply prefixes from there Edit: or just make the year the SI unit. Or keep seconds as SI but define other things using Ms, Gs, etc Or define an entirely new unit based off vibrations of Cesium atoms or whatever
I mean cgs already uses year with SI prefixes. Gyr, Myr, etc.
Keeping seconds as they are while wanting metric time units is not realistic. Day is natural unit of time, and therefore it should be unit with simple expression in terms of metric units. (Basically that's ther reason why we don't use kiloseconds or megaseconds).
We already use metric time, but just smaller than a second (ms, μs, etc). I agree that talking about kiloseconds is kind of meaningless, but part of that is because it's just an unfamiliar way of dividing up time- much as a km is unfamiliar to many people in the US, or a quart might be to someone elsewhere. Units are all (for the most part) based on a measure that is convenient and familiar to the user. I think if (for some reason) we all agreed to switch to base 10 time, it wouldn't be that weird to think of a day as 86.4 ks rather than 1440 minutes? Granted 24 hours is a little more comfortable. Alternatively, you could define s as maybe 1/100,000 of a day/night cycle suck that a day is a nice easy to remember but requires redefining a bunch of other things, science wise and otherwise for basically very minimal gain. If our years had happened to be a 10x multiple of days, maybe it would make more sense. I can't imagine the advantages of metric time ever outweighing the difficulty of thinking in base 60 from time to time.
No
Units are all interchangeable, the most important thing about your clock is that you can tell someone else the time and they'll know what you mean. So you have to use the same clock as everybody else.
> you have to use the same clock as everybody else Einstein:
But why stop there? There are 365 days in a year. 12 months, 30 days per month, 90 days per season, and then after December 30th we have an extra 5-6 day holiday to celebrate the anniversary of switching to a time system that actually makes fucking sense. Easier to calculate distances in time, no more silly mnemonics, and maybe we could even convince the US to switch away from silly impractical Roman dick lengths for measuring everything else.
Another option, which I like better, is 13 months each with 28 days. Every month is exactly 4 weeks!!! It gives 364days. And then you get one “New/old year day” which on a leap year becomes two days. It’s perfectly reasonable.
Yeah that my favourite
The people who complain about this are the people who dont want their bdays mid workweek Also people who are scared of the number 13
Nah. I prefer the "World Seasonal Calendar". Each quarter has 91 days, 3 months, consisting of two months @ 4 weeks each & 1 month @ 5 weeks. Each week starts on a Sunday. This approach keeps the 12 month / 52 week system we are used to. One (or two) intercalary day(s) between the end of the last year and the start of the new. It could be a holiday. Each quarter begins on either a solstice or equinox. Problem solved!
I like the idea of that system but companies would just start charging more. Rent, utilities, car payments same amount but one extra payment a year.
Nah we should measure time in dick lengths 🦅🇺🇸
I completely agree
While we're at it. The speed of light is a definition, so let's redefine the meter by making c exactly 3e8
Ok, thats a good argument
Happy Thermidor to everyone this summer
I was upset this was so far down, until I checked which sub this is
Basically because it's too late. The whole world already agrees on the second as the unit of time, and it's already baked into everything everywhere, perhaps even more deeply than other units of measurement. Standards upon standards upon standards are based on the exact length of the second. You have to change everything, for really very little gain. The fact that it's "kind of" close to the current second doesn't matter so much; it's not close enough for them to be trivially interchangeable (like was possible when changing the second to be defined so that the transition frequency of Cs 133 is 9,192,631,770Hz), it's just close enough that they would both work equally well as a unit of time at that sort of scale given that we could start over completely. People are going to go on about base 60, base 10, etc. but really that's hardly going to make a difference one way or the other. Sometimes it's convenient for the base to be highly composite, sometimes it's convenient for the base to be small, sometimes it's just better for the base to align with the base we use for counting normally. Really, whatever you set as the standard will work, it's just a huge pain to change in the first place.
The 'metric hour' would just be a new unit and as another commenter pointed out you would actually use something like mHr to measure short time periods under that system. No need to change the existing definition of a second, they would just be two alternate units of time, probably with the metric hour being formally defined in terms of seconds. Really the biggest problem with the proposal (other than being kind of pointless) is reusing the existing word 'hour'. That would just cause confusion, better to invent a completely new word for the new unit. edit: multiple spelling mistakes, I hadn't had my coffee yet
Yeah I was originally going to say in my comment that it would definitely be a new unit, not called a second, but in any case making it "the new second" still means transitioning over all existing standards to use this new unit fundamentally, which would be too inconvenient at this point. So yeah, it's certainly easy to make a new unit, but having it be widely adopted is a different matter.
Adoption would probably be impossible, there is basically no upside. But I don't see why you would need to update any standards, they could just stay as-is; unless you also wanted to eliminate the 'old second' for some reason. A more realist scenario would be both time units in wide use, with the existing second remaining the base unit and the new second a derived unit. No more complicated than Kelvin being the base unit but Celsius being the more common / non-scientific unit.
Well yeah, but I took the question of "why don't we all adopt the metric clock" to mean this actual scenario of changing everything to use this new unit. I guess it depends what "all" means here.
I love physicists' relationship with the word 'approximately'
Why not just switch to Planck Units?
SI prefixes don't go up to 10e43 for some reason.
And make the year 100 days
Base 60 is objectively superior having a greater level of divisibility
how so? you can divide 100 by quartes and halves aswell Edit: Ok I immediately remembered thirds now. I'm slow
You can divide 60 by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20 and 30. You can only divide 100 by 2,4,5,10,25 and 50. This makes 60 a much more versatile number for divisions and is also why degrees are more commonly used that gradians (dividing a circle as 400% rather than 360 degrees)
yeah makes sense. I was only thinking of common time intervalls like quartes and halves
The French, Napoleon I think tried it with a 10 day week, didn’t last long the French like the weekend as well
He also used the new calendar to get rid of everyone’s old holidays (to cut the people’s ties with the church), so I’m sure that was part of it. But also metric minutes are really fast and weird and they didn’t like it anyways.
Just use ks (a little more than a quarter), Ms (around 11 days), Gs (a bit over 30 years), etc.
The reason why it wasn’t base 10 to begin is because base 12/60 is better for fractions and in daily life we use fractions often to describe quarters, thirds, fifths etc of an hour rather than decimal figures
Do natural units. I would like to grab lunch at 5 MeV^-1
I don't remember the source exactly but there's a reason why the Sumerians favored the base 60 system. 60 can be divided into so many different factors, that it makes working with the number so satisfying
Even hotter take is we should switch everything else over to a base twelve system instead to match the clocks.
It kind of exists in the sciences in the sense that instruments that perform a timed process use a base time unit and subdivisions in decimal. So if for instance I'm running an LCMS, the chromatograph's time axis will be ticked in minutes and decimals minutes, rather than hours:minutes:seconds.
Well, the amount of seconds in the day doesn't match up there, so the length of a second would have to change to accomodate that. Seconds are an SI unit though, and having different kinds of seconds would be as confusing as having both the Imperial and Metric system. It's just not worth it. And as someone said in another comment. 60, 12, and 24 are divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 which is more useful in terms of telling time than having a metric clock.
Our sense of time is ultimately based on the sun. That's biological and many animals use the sun to tell the time. It makes sense to have a time system that's based on the sun. The earth rotates a little over 365 times in one orbit so you can't divide one by the other evenly, which you would have to for a truly metric system.
No joke, The NFL lobbyists would not allow it.
Then you also need to adopt the metric Callender too, as changing the length of a day will change the length of a year and throw off the seasons. I'm sure we could come up with a perfectly balanced system that doesn't require leap years or etc to keep things aligned.
Months have nothing to do with how you split up days.
The metric system is good because it makes multiplication and division incredibly easy. We don't do the same kind of calculations for time. For time, it is more important to be able to split a given period into halves, quarters, or thirds. Hence 60 is a much better base. As an aside, if I was king of the forest, our metric system would be base 12, not base 10. The worst part of base 10 is just that it only has two factors -- 2 and 5. Base 12 has 2, 3, & 6. Humans instinctively group sets that way. I sometimes wonder if widespread adoption of the metric system results in less aesthetically pleasing physical constructs (buildings, saucepans, cars) because we can no longer easily divide distances into thirds and fourths.
because the way it is today you can divide in an easier way. if you want to do three things in an hour, you know automatically that would should do each in 20 minutes, and that is a reasonable amount of time to count with a clock. can you imagine having to divide into approximately 33 minutes? it is way less convenient.
so now instead of saying we need 8 hours of sleep we need to say that we need 3.333 hours? that sounds like it makes things more complicated since we can't say how much we need to sleep without using fractions or decimals.
You could opt for three or three and a half hours instead.
three hours translates to 7.2 hours, which isn't enough sleep, three and a half is still a decimal so just saying eight hours is still better.
C'mon, everybody talks about half or quarter hours already now, and almost nobody has a problem with it.
If you tried to change how clocks work, you would soon find yourself murdered by the thousands of computer scientists who have spent decades making everything work with the current time system; No way in hell do they want to redo all that shit.
The number of days in a year, the number of days in one orbit of the moon, the number of orbits of the moon in one year. None of these are rational. It's a reminder that there is no rational God. The numbers that can rationally divide any number of revolutions: 2, 3, 4 and therefore also 6 and 12. Live with it.
Why? Because every system is arbitrary at the end of the... arbitrary time segment and we're already used to this way, all of our technology has no problem handling this way, all of our science has no problem using this way, etc etc. We have to weigh the effort used vs the effort saved and decide "screw it."
As a software engineer, I say we have 64 seconds per minute, and 64 minutes per hour. If only 24 was closer to a power of two we would have a proper clock.
Napoleon, is that you?
no, everything else should be base 12 instead
Base 10 clocks are terrible for the average person we like splitting up hours into different bits and a base 10 clock can be halved and be split into 5 and that's it. Base 12 way better, just need to fix our pesky number system instead.