Time was decimalised. Sort of. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians divided the day into 10 hours. Then added 1 twilight hour at the beginning and one at the end. Since the day was 12 hours, the night was also 12 hours. 12 is also the number of finger joints on your hand excluding the thumb. What they also discovered was at night a set of constellations that would rise at 10 day intervals and that there were 36 of these that rose in turn throughout the year until they got back to the first which gave them a year of 10 x 36 = 360 days. At any one time 18 of these were visible, 3 during each twilight and 12 during darkness. So the rise of each constellation at night marked the start of a nighttime hour.felixkk wrote:Next on the list is to decimalize the time. The 60 minutes, 24 hours thing make no sense. Still working on a way to convert the days per year.
60 is an interesting number. It is the lowest number divisible by the 1st 6 counting numbers, also by 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. The ancient Babylonians used the sexagisimal (base 60) system for astronomical calculations. It was the Greek astronomers and mathematicians of the second century BC that divided the hours of the day into 60 minutes and the minutes into 60 seconds.
The second now is defined as the amount of time it takes a Cesium-133 atom to vibrate exactly 9,192,631,770 times. And the metre is now defined as the distance travelled by a beam of light in 1/299,792,458th of a second. Or in the time that a Cesium-133 atom vibrates 30.66331898849837 (only calculated to 14 decimal places) times.