What makes the metric system appealing is that each physical quantity has exactly one "base" unit, and you can make easy conversions– just multiply or divide by 10.
The thing about time is, there are two important 'natural' units that aren't going away: the day and the year. Whatever system you devise has to include them somehow. And unfortunately, the conversion factor between them (365) isn't a multiple of 10.
That said, we can do a lot better than the status quo. Since we've already given up on the idea of having a single base unit for everything, why not express time in fractions of days instead of multiples of seconds? Counting time up to 1.0 days is a lot more intuitive than counting up to 8.64 myriaseconds. The second is a unit of time which isn't tied to anything intuitive (actually, it's entirely arbitrary). If we're going to shake things up, let's at least use days instead, yeah?
They're proposing changing the second and you're correct that it will mess up a ton of other units. The problem is they think the day is the base unit when it's actually the second.
Yes. There is a reason why we fiddle with stuff like leap-seconds instead of simply letting the second dilate ever so slightly, as Earth's rotation slows down ever so slightly, so that there are still exactly 86,400 seconds in a day.
Since 1967, the second has been defined as 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.† The caesium atom is far more consistent than the Earth.
> Counting time up to 1.0 days is a lot more intuitive than counting up to 8.64 myriaseconds. The second is a unit of time which isn't tied to anything intuitive (actually, it's entirely arbitrary). If we're going to shake things up, let's at least use days instead, yeah?
No. The length of a day is not constant. The size of a second is defined based on the length of the day in 1900.
The problem with days and years is that they change as the Earth's velocity varies over time. You can't use days and years for scientific work unless you define a specific unchanging length for them, but if you do that they will soon get out of sync with the Earth's rotation.
I'm not suggesting replacing the second for scientific work-- that would be a mess, I agree. But since it seems the day is already good enough for casual timekeeping, why not replace the non-scientific, imprecise, everyday uses of second/minute/hour with fractions of the day?
You could come at it in a similar way to how the real second was developed. Initially the second was defined as 1/86,400th of a day, later narrowed to a mean solar day, but that still wasn't specific enough so they switched it to the current caesium atom definition.
If we wanted to subdivide the day into 100,000 new units instead of 86,400 seconds, we could simply take the current caesium atom definition * 864,000 / 100,000 and you would get a precise, scientifically acceptable unit that would be about 1/100,000 of a day, but still have the need for the occasional leap units.
It's essentially the same as switching to seconds. It's much easier to say "It's 4.3" (with myriaseconds assumed) when referring to midday than it is to say "It's 43000."
It seems to me, you'd need to redefine the second such that there is a nice round number of them in a day. Say 100,000 to the day. They you could subdivide into hectoseconds (new minute, 86.4 old seconds), kiloseconds (14.4 old minutes), myriaseconds (tenth of a day, 8640 old seconds). Noon would fall on a nice even boundary.
(Of course, this ignores the fact that the day length is not constant, but we have that problem with the present system, too.)
The myriasecond would be the new, lower-resolution hour, much as the Celsius degree is lower-resolution than the Fahrenheit. This would be mitigated by writing decimal times (e.g., 3.75 myriaseconds on the clock would correspond to 9 am).
You'd also need to come up with less clunky names than myriasecond, I would think.
Edit: Why it'll never happen: Redefining the second would screw up too many things other than time of day references. E.g., frequencies and other physical measurements based on the second.
This is a silly and possibly stupid idea, and calling it "Metric" does metricification a huge disservice by associating it with these kinds of foolish notions.
A Meter was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole. [1]
And everything else followed from there - even volume measurements like a liter was based on this, because one mL was defined as a cubic cm.
...So to do the same thing with time, it probably makes sense to base things around a day or year (so it's based on the Earth going around the Sun) and just divide that amount of time by some nice base 10 number (1000, 10000, whatever).
A day currently contains 86400 seconds.. why not just shorten how long a second is until there are 100000 of them in a day... Of course then there will be 36500000 in a year, which is not so fantasic.
There is no reason we couldn't re-define hour and minute to be base 10 divisions of this "100000 per day second"
Leap days and seconds are still an interesting problem.
Exactly. 100,000 "seconds", 20 "hours" (each hour = 5000 seconds), 50 "minutes" (each minute = 100 seconds). If you're gonna do it, something like that seems sensible. Easily divisible, neat, etc.
That said, I don't think the current system is too onerous, 60 is a nice number (thanks Sumerians), and when you bring leap seconds into it it has to be messy anyway, so what's the point? So it's more a thought experiment than anything.
I like your point. And I do agree that a 100000-second day would be awesome, but I tried to switch to new time measurements _without_ having to redefine anything. A second is still a second. A day is still a day. I've only added a definition, the myriasecond (myria- being the 10000 prefix) and removed two definitions, the minute and the hour.
Why are you basing things off of seconds? The day is a constant defined by nature, I would much prefer a system based around the day. A second is actually pretty arbitrary.
Well, there are several definitions of "day", (86.4 kiloseconds, calendar day, stellar day, sidereal day, and solar day, for five of the more common) and of all the definitions I am aware of, only 86.4 kiloseconds is constant.("Defined by nature" does not, itself, seem to be well-defined in a way which would distinguish most of them from the second.)
Everyone in these comments appear to be missing the point of the article. The author is not trying to redefine the second or use different units.
The point of the article is:
> aimed to eliminate both minutes and hours
The author is simply trying to track their day using nothing but seconds. The current definition of the second. The author uses the "myria" prefix to mean 10,000 (instead of kilo or hecto) but it's otherwise simply using seconds.
Why use the second? Because it is the SI unit for time. It is the unit that all scientific measurements use but we rarely use it to schedule our lives. It's an experiment, nothing more.
Metric time is fun, but why not take it a step further and abandon the metric system, which places too much emphasis on base 10? We used the (21 cm) hydrogen line in the Pioneer plaque; if we don't use metric with our potential cosmic neighbors, isn't that a sign we should reconsider its usage?
Swatch already tried this with the Swatch Beat ("Swatch Internet Time")[1]. I actually owned a beat-capable watch for a while.
I think the beat was better in that it was easier to reason relative to the day: a day was 1000 beat, and a beat was a little over 1 minute. There would be no daylight savings time, and no timezones. The entire world would run on the same beat.
As a software engineer, the idea fascinates me. The complexity of time is a constant struggle for computers. Every time DST comes around, things have a tendency to crash. Not to mention Y2K.
But then again, this can easily be solved by standardizing on 64-bit UTC unix timestamps.
The French actually beat Swatch by a a couple centuries - during the French Revolution they spent about twenty years fooling around with metric/decimal time. Ten hours a day, 100 minutes an hour, and 100 seconds per minute (each second ended up about 14% shorter than a "normal" second).
They real fun is in the calendar, with 12 months of 30 days each, and rules like "every tenth day is named after a mineral."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Deci...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Ten_...
Beat was an amazing concept. I still have this watch and love it. That's a pity it didn't get popular, but I partially blame the design of the watches.
IIRC, the 28 day month was the norm before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, and it is still used, for example in the Islamic calendar (that's the reason why the fasting month of Ramadan drifts from one year to the next).
I've read enough science fiction based on this principle that I'm semi-comfortable with kiloseconds, megaseconds, and gigaseconds (roughly a quarter hour, a tenday, and a third of a century, respectively). I'm not sure what the "myria-" prefix really adds to the mix.
The people that are objecting on the grounds that it doesn't fit the "natural" unit of the day (or month, or year) are missing the point: metric is all about picking units regardless of any convenient lineup to anything, and then applying them to everything anyway. As a matter of usage, most people take this concept even further and always count from the next smaller unit even if the larger one is closer: thus you rarely hear of "half litre" but rather "500 mL", not "quarter metre" but "25 cm" or "250 mm". Basing metric time on seconds makes vastly more sense from this perspective.
Frankly I find refering "30 kay secs" (for 30 killoseconds) easier and more convenient than "3 myriasecs".
Wolfram Alpha does support myriaseconds, and abbreviates as "mas" which isn't bad.
I actually find 1 killosecond to be a great basis for a fairly human time measure, since it's just over 15 minutes, and that's a granularity that feels very natural to me.
I've put some thought towards kiloseconds before deciding on myriaseconds. I find that the main advantage to myrias (as I call them) is that you can break your day up into them very easily. Currently, I believe that most people break their days up by hours (e.g., wake up at 8, work 9 to 5, dinner at 7).
I tried to make the same exact concept apply to myrias. I wake up at 3 (~9am). Work from 3 to 7 (9 to 4). Read and relax around 8 (~10pm).
yeah but there is an extremely good reason for using base 12/60 for time and just in general. I wish people had thought this through before adopting the metric system. Frankly, I don't think they were as smart as they thought they were.
60 is highly composite (divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). 12 is a highly composite (divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6). This is a nice property for a numbers used for unit quantities because a common operation on unit quantities is division by small numbers.
So it's actually kind of unfortunate that we don't all have 6-fingered hands.
The thing about time is, there are two important 'natural' units that aren't going away: the day and the year. Whatever system you devise has to include them somehow. And unfortunately, the conversion factor between them (365) isn't a multiple of 10.
That said, we can do a lot better than the status quo. Since we've already given up on the idea of having a single base unit for everything, why not express time in fractions of days instead of multiples of seconds? Counting time up to 1.0 days is a lot more intuitive than counting up to 8.64 myriaseconds. The second is a unit of time which isn't tied to anything intuitive (actually, it's entirely arbitrary). If we're going to shake things up, let's at least use days instead, yeah?
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