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.
While metric time has some appeal, I think it is not ambitious enough.
Base 10 is not good. 10 just does not have enough factors, so we are left to deal with complex fractions. Let's instead use base-12 numerals and keep time unchanged!
In base 12, 1 year is 10 months (or 265 days), 1 day is 20 hours, 1 hour is 50 minutes and a minute is 50 seconds.
Easy enough!
Edit: wait! I just realized this is still not ambitious enough!!!
What we need is to halve seconds in two. So, in base 12: 1 day = 10 hours, 1 hour = 100 minutes, 1 minute = 100 new seconds.
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.
I noticed as a kid that while 60 seconds/minutes seemed odd when we live in a base-10 number system, it was incredibly convenient when dividing into parts: 60 is divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,8,10,12,15,20,30. Always thought that was sort of clever.
24 is similarly divisible by 2,3,4,6,8,12, whereas 25 is only evenly divisible by 5. So those odd-looking "constants" are good for something after all.
You're correct that 60 is more useful when dividing,
BUT:
Say we had 32 hours in a day, 64 minutes in an hour, 64 seconds in a minute... You could do date arithmetic simply. You could work out the number of seconds by simple bitshifts, rather than having to multiply and divide by 60/24.
Yep. 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 12 hours. To the Sumerian mind that was apparently as nice and round as 100 seconds, 100 minutes, 20 hours.
60 is the smallest composite number with three prime factors, and divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30. Decimal only divides by 2 and 5. Makes arithmetic by hand a lot easier. Duodecimal has a similar advantage.
There's a handy rule of thumb for this: is the number of seconds per minute (60 aka 2*2*3*5) a weird, random-sounding number that's way too easy to make clean subdivisions out of[0], rather than a nice, math-hostile power of ten? Then it's probably already in American units, unless it's British.
You are right; if we need about 1 second a year that is about 30 minutes in 2000 years. Lets agree to add a leap hour 2000 years from now - that will put us 30 minutes ahead so we can go 4000 years until we need to add another hour
How wonderful would the world be if we had a base 10 clock instead of 24?
Let's make a day be 86400 seconds (already a SI standard), and then you can divide that into tenths, hundreds or whatever. One thousand of a day is 84.4 seconds, which is close to a minute (which is (/ 60 (/ 24 one-day))).
We have metric for measurements in space, but something as simple for day-to-day time measurement would be nice.
> Let's make a day be 86400 seconds (already a SI standard), and then you can divide that into tenths, hundreds or whatever.
Why not keep the day as it is, which can be conveniently divided into halves, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, eights, ninths, tenths and twelfths, as well as any multiples of those you like?
> each day has 24 hours 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds
> at midnight your martian clock would show the time as 24:39:35 for a fraction of a second
A similar idea could be to have exactly 24h 39min 35s each day (i.e. the last second before midnight is 24:39:34), then add a leap second every 4 days to compensate for the missing 0.244s, then skip it when the 0.006s errors cumulate up to 1s.
This just because in my opinion it is easier to live with leap seconds than with non-integer seconds.
I actually had something similar to this in my notes but didn't get around to adding it. Basically, 60 minutes seems kind of arbitrary for an entire system of time (at least to me!) and then I realized that once you split it down into half, thirds, quarters, etc., it's basically the best numbers to use for informal conversations about time. That was pretty illuminating when I read about that; thanks for pointing it out here!
100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 20 hours a day. New seconds are 0.432 old seconds, or whatever ratio they need to make to quit leaping around.
I for one would love to have metric time. Just today I had to add some durations together to get total duration, which would have been simple thing to do with metric time.
Of course for practical use using SI second wouldn't be very good solution. Traditionally second is derived from the length of day, and I think that would make sense for metric time too. 1 milliday would be somewhat close to 1 minute and 50 millidays (or maybe half deciday) would be close to one hour. Of course the name probably should be something else than "day" to reduce confusion.
So I could be working something like 16 decidays next week.
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.
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