what if our whole idea of time, based on seconds, and extended to years and millennia is just
wrong.
WHAT IF EVERYTHING WE KNOW IS WRONG.
Hey Guys Julia here for Dnews.
Just trying not to freak out over here.
Our system of time seems so inevitable.
Like math, it just seems to be out there in the universe waiting to be put into words
by humans.
But not really.
Ancient cultures just kind of made it up.
A variety of ancient cultures used different bases for systems of counting.
Like the metric system is a base 10 system.
Which makes sense, most of us have ten fingers to count on.
But other systems were just as widely used.
Like the duodecimal system which uses 12 as a base.
Maybe 12 became such an important number because it takes 12 lunar cycles to make one trip
around the sun or maybe even more basic than that.
Rather than counting fingers, maybe people counted knuckles with their thumbs.
Or maybe blame the stars.
Some cultures used to keep track of time by the sky.
The ancient Egyptians used sundials during the day and divided the day into 12 parts.
But at night, they found 36 stars that seemed to divide the night sky into equal parts.
They called these decans.
There were 18 stars that would appear throughout the night, but some appeared during dawn or
dusk.
So at true night, there would 12 decans, appearing almost 40 minutes apart.
Eventually this was standardized so days and nights each had 12 hours.
But only on equinoxes were those hours equal.
Throughout the seasons the length of an hour would change.
During winter, night time hours would be longer, and daytime hours were shorter.
It really wasn’t until the mechanization of clocks in the 1300s did hours become fixed.
But how did an hour get divided into 60 units?
Well blame the Ancient Babylonians or probably the Sumerians.
Over 4,000 years ago, they worked on a base 60 system of counting.
Why they picked a base 60 system is a bit of a mystery, maybe by counting five fingers
on one hand and counting the 12 knuckles on the other.
And 60 is good for breaking down into fractions.
Who knows.
But what’s also important, they divided circles into 360 parts.
Ancient Greek astronomers built on these models.
They tried to measure the Earth by them.
They divided the Earth into 360 parts in a kind of latitude and longitudinal lines.
Claudius Ptolemy divided these parts into smaller parts which he called first minute.
Then those parts were divided into 60 smaller parts called "second minute," which became
the second.
But minutes and seconds weren’t really used for timekeeping until better mechanical clocks
arrived on the scene in the 16th century.
Fast forward a few centuries and now we have even better timekeeping.
We’ve got the atomic clock.
It measures a second by 9,192,631,770 energy transitions of the cesium atom.
But this Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) doesn’t always match up to astrological
time since Earth’s rotation is slowing down.
So sometimes, around 8 times every decade, a second has to be added to a minute!
Eventually, more seconds will need to be added more often.
In another century we’ll have to add 2 seconds a year!
Well what do you think?
What if we switched to a decimal time system, where everything is based on ten, like the
Ancient Chinese used or like some people during the French Revolution wanted?
HOW CRAZY WOULD THAT BE