No. Base 12 and base 60 are significantly better for things that are commonly divided into halves, thirds, fourths and so on.
A “day” is 86400 seconds. Changing the length of a second is a non starter, so you’d end up saying a day doesn’t line up with a day night cycle, or something weird like “a day is 8.64 hours long”, which doesn’t feel better than 24.
There’s absolutely no reason why days couldn’t be divided in 10 hours of 1000 seconds, we’d just need to change the definition of a second. The 24 * 60 system is based on a numbering system of a civilisation that’s long gone and it’s as arbitrary as metric or imperial measurements.
The problem is that we have a lot of definitions for “events per second” so redefining all those would be very annoying and costly. Then again, most countries switched to metric and did all those things, so it definitely can be done.
We could change the definition of a second, but we’d be changing the si unit of time to mesh up with things that don’t currently have si equivalents. We’d have to redo a significant number of units.
The meter is defined in terms of the second, which is then used to define the kilogram.
It’s a base unit that all the others are built on. This wouldn’t be a tweak, it would be rebuilding the metric system. So that there would be ten hours in a day, which we would keep having to tweak because the earths rotation isn’t constant, which is why “day” isn’t an si unit in the first place.
Yeah, the civilization that decided they like base 60 is long gone, but the reason they liked it is still relevant, which is why we keep using it. Highly composite numbers are really convenient, and ten is a pretty shitty number beyond being the base we often count in.
No. Base 12 and base 60 are significantly better for things that are commonly divided into halves, thirds, fourths and so on.
A “day” is 86400 seconds. Changing the length of a second is a non starter, so you’d end up saying a day doesn’t line up with a day night cycle, or something weird like “a day is 8.64 hours long”, which doesn’t feel better than 24.
There’s absolutely no reason why days couldn’t be divided in 10 hours of 1000 seconds, we’d just need to change the definition of a second. The 24 * 60 system is based on a numbering system of a civilisation that’s long gone and it’s as arbitrary as metric or imperial measurements.
The problem is that we have a lot of definitions for “events per second” so redefining all those would be very annoying and costly. Then again, most countries switched to metric and did all those things, so it definitely can be done.
We could change the definition of a second, but we’d be changing the si unit of time to mesh up with things that don’t currently have si equivalents. We’d have to redo a significant number of units.
The meter is defined in terms of the second, which is then used to define the kilogram.
It’s a base unit that all the others are built on. This wouldn’t be a tweak, it would be rebuilding the metric system. So that there would be ten hours in a day, which we would keep having to tweak because the earths rotation isn’t constant, which is why “day” isn’t an si unit in the first place.
Yeah, the civilization that decided they like base 60 is long gone, but the reason they liked it is still relevant, which is why we keep using it. Highly composite numbers are really convenient, and ten is a pretty shitty number beyond being the base we often count in.