Why has time not been decimalised?

Question

well every thing else has been.

Answer 1

For goodness sake, keep quiet! Someone from the EU may hear you!

Answer 2

It's because the units turn out to be inconvenient. The fundamental units of time relevant to life on earth are the year and the day. Since there are roughly 365.25 days in a year, this can't easily be decimalised. Theoretically it would be possible to decimalise the sub-units of a day, but why bother when everyone is so used to the existing system? A thousandth of a day, for example, would be just over 86 seconds, so it could potentially be an acceptable unit of time. Unfortunately the SI unit of measurements is based on the second, so of course every single scientific unit and calculation which relies on the second would have to change.

Answer 3

Well, the ancient egyptians had a calender, usually on ceiling of temples where they had two gods (Horus) at each point of the compass plus 4 "ladies" at NE, SE, SW and NW, making twelve figures holding a circle/sky. One for each month so we get twelve months (they had a base 10 numbering system).

The number of hands is then 24, giving the hours in a day but I'm not sure they had accurate clocks (sundials perhaps?)

They had 10 days in each week and exactly three weeks in each month (always 30 days). At the end of each year, they added the extra 4 days or 5 in a leap year to make the solar calendar year.

You can blame the ancient Sumarians (modern syria/Iraq) about 4000 years ago for the sexagesimal numbering system ie 60 minutes in an hour etc.

It could be done, as with the conversion to km, kg etc, but will create a lot of confusion in transition as everyone in the world will be affected. The French tried it after their revolution.

Since a day is also a convenient measure of time, I think decimalising the months/year may be problematic, but really give a boost to the watch industry (do you have shares in swiss watches?)

Answer 4

You can't change the number of days in a year as this is fixed by the duration of the earth's rotation and its orbit around the sun.

There used to be 10 months in a year - September, October, November and December were the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months, hence their names, but Roman emperors Julius and Augustus decided they should have months named after themselves and another two were added. Of course, they didn't want winter months, so they got stuffed into the middle of the year.

Time keeping was originally devised by the Babylonians, whose number systems was based on 60. so that's why there are 60 seconds in a minute etc.

Hours and minutes could be decimalised, but we'd all have to buy new watches. And a 10-day week would mean extra days at work. No thanks!

Answer 5

We probably will move to it at some point. Right now, we can't even agree on time zones and DST. Days should probably stay the same as it is a relative constant as long as we just live on earth. As for months, they were initially based on the lunar cycle. A year reflected the seasonal change way before we knew about orbits.

Given that we should probably stick with years and days (till (if) exo-Terra colonization occurs), that really leaves us with time in a day. Come up with a better system (we've basically "decimalized" sub-second intervals-- nanosecond, picoseconds, femtosecond, etc...) and maybe we will use it. Maybe you can create a time based kelvin scale with 5.4×10^−44 seconds equaling one unit of base time and moving up from there.

Answer 6

It has been!
It's used primarily for calculation. Open an Excel spreadsheet (any spreadsheet will probably work) and enter the date and time in a cell. Then reformat the cell in a general numeric format. The date will magically appear to you as it does to the computer - with the date to the left of the decimal and the time to the right.

The standard 12H:M:S format is easier for the human mind to process until we start adding and subtracting times, then we need 24 hour formats.

Answer 7

if you mean why dont we have decimals when describing time then of course time has been decimalised

watch the upcoming F1 race in the weekend and you will see how two drivers finish within 100th of a second of each other and that makes a difference such as 1 finishes at 27.14.2345 and 2nd finishes at 27.14.3155

Answer 8

Strangely my super-duper overseas call provider "Call2.com" times all completed calls in 100s, such that 3 and a half minutes will appear as 3:50, and so on.

They do it because their extremely low cost is billed even more effectively decimally. Make sense...maybe ?

Go figure.

Answer 9

because decimal values go up to hundred while units of time, seconds actually, are in 60.

You can write it as decimal form:
Eg: 5:30 can be 5.5.

Answer 10

The french tried after the revolution but they never managed to get people to adopt it.