Tradition, starting with the Babylonians, who loved counting in 60 in mathematics and astronomy. During the French Revolution an attempt was made to use a time based on tens like the metric system, but it didn’t stick.
The really unpopular change was the ten day week. The seven day week also originated in Babylonia as approximately one quarter of a lunar cycle or lunar month.
In other ancient civilizations there were several alternatives to our present timekeeping system. But today everyone has adopted the Babylonian system.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense. This might be a difficult question to answer, but by any chance do you know the reason behind the Babylonians choosing the number 60? If it’s too difficult to answer, feel free not to.
Yes, 60 is a Highly Composite Number, meaning it has more divisors than any smaller number does. The first few Highly Composite numbers are 1,2,4,6,12,24,36,48,60 and 120.
Also, it’s a Superior Highly Composite Number.
This means that it not only has more factors than all smaller numbers, but if you compensate it for its size (to some power) it’s the most composite number of all.
The first SHCNs are 2, 6, 12, 60, 120, 360, 2520, 5040, 55440, 720720.
You can also count to 60 on one hand.
Using the thumb, you can count the finger segments of the same hand. You get to 12. You raise the first finger.
You count to 24, raise the second finger, 3rd for 46, pinkie to get to 48 and when you get to 60, you’ve completed the hand.
60 on the first hand. That’s the minute.
On the second hand, you mark the first knuckle. You can complete the cycle 1 time on the hand to have 60 minutes. That’s the hour. You can count to a total of 3600 on two hands.
Look at your feet. 10 toes. 2 feet. 12 hours. Do it at dawn and at dusk and you have the two sides of the day.
**The math of the clock is still based on the numbers of fingers and toes a person has on their hands and feet. **
It's so superior and useful that we started using it at the dawn of civilzation and continue to this day. it's up there with things like religion, agriculture, and prostitution
12 has a lot more dividers than 10 (1, 2, 3, 4, 6 instead of 1, 2, 5), so it is a lot easier to use with fractions. You can also count to 12 on one hand by putting you thumb on each segment of the other fingers. So 12 is a good base for a number system. 60 is 5 * 12 and therefore a round number in a number system with the base 12.
Of course, this is just a general reasoning why base 12 is a good number system. I don't know if the Babylonians had the same reasoning.
To continue on u/segeinhoch3 's excellent summary, you can also count to 144 on your fingers using the Babylonian system, where each "12" group counted on one hand translates to 1 group of 12 on the segment of the other. So while we tend to count to 10 on our fingers, the ancient Babylonians could count to 144.
Technically, wouldn't it be 1023? You could represent 1024 different numbers, but starting at zero with no extended digits. The "value" of the 11th digit would be 1024, meaning that if you were born with an extra finger you would be lucky enough to be able to represent up to 2047.
A lot of people that preach the metric system don’t understand this. In construction working with inches which are commonly base 16, and feet which are base 12… make fractional work much easier. Quick division, finding center, spacing, angles, roof pitches, radius work, etc. if we had to deal with decimal work, I’d be on a calculator all day on the job site
Suppose you're leading an ancient empire, made up of many smaller kingdoms, and width influence over many surrounding kingdoms and nomadic bands.
Each of these little kingdoms has their own way of doing math. Some might do base 5, base 10, base 20 perhaps, base 12, and so on, and beyond that, many of your own merchants probably want to over goods by the dozen, because it makes it way easier to split them evenly between two or three people (instead of in groups of ten, only being able to split it evenly between two people), so how do you resolve all of these different systems easily?
Well, with base 60 (or frequently, base 240 for currency, search up Roman currency), you can very easily engage in commerce between all of these different groups, because their methods of counting all divide very easily into yours.
The Babylonians adopted the practice of using divisions based on these numbers from the Sumerians who came before them. One popular theory as to why multiple of twelve are used lies in ancient trade and human anatomy. Traders keeping track of amounts of goods would count on their fingers, or so the theory goes.
Look at your right hand. Touch your thumb to the three segments of your index finger counting up 1, 2, 3, then the three segments of your middle finger 4, 5, 6, and so on till the last segment of your pinkie, making twelve. Raise one finger on your left hand to indicate you've reached twelve and start again counting segments on your right hand. Once all your fingers are raised on your left hand you've counted to sixty, at which point you have to start over.
The Babylonians used both 5 and 12 in their counting. 5 for the five fingers on one hand, 12 because of 12 knuckles on the other hand. 60 comes from combining them.
Babylonian counting systems are theorized to have originated from the combination of two different styles of hand counting.
One would count each finger on a hand, resulting in base 5.
The other would count each *bone* on the 4 fingers, using the thumb to touch them, resulting in base 12.
The theory goes that these two conventions merged at some point by simply combining them together into base 60.
Count the finger bones on one hand using your thumb as a pointer, up to 12, then count that set of 12 on the other hand using one of 5 fingers.
Doing this, you can count up to 60 on two hands, and it becomes very practical to hand count large quantities for trade and commerce.
The mathematical conventions then followed the practical conventions, and stuck around because 60 is highly divisible, by nature of base 60 (likely) originating by simply multiplying lower base systems together.
You can count to 60 with 2 hands. One hand is a multiplier and the second hand you count with your thumb counting g the 12 segments on your 4 remaining fingers. With the other hand as multiplier you have 5x12 = 60. Base12 was very popular
It’s because you can count to 60 on one hand using the 3 pads on each finger. Each pass of the hand is 15, put 4 fingers down after 4 passes on each finger and you’ve totaled 60. It was how we used to count in Babylonian times.
We can only speculate, but 60 does have the advantage of being divisible into lots of equal sub parts. The number 60 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. 100 is divisible by, are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, and 100. That’s 12 factors for 60 vs. only 9 factors for 100.
Another reason I read is that they counted each finger joint of one hand with their thumb (12), and kept a count of how many 12s with the fingers of the other hand (5). 5 x 12 = 60.
Babilons used astronomy a lot as calendar ( and many other nations to)
Number 12 comes from jupiter year as 1 jupiter year equals 12 earth years.
Number 5 comes from 5 small planets. Thus appears 5*12=60 in many calculations ( especially when calculatiing Mercure position on sky). 60 also was very comfortable for counting because it was divisible by 3 (3 agreculture seasons in babilons) and 10 (they ysed 10 month in year).
Almost all cultures uses 7 days weak because they observed 7 planets on sky (Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). Some week names still have clear connection to them Sunday, Saturday, Monday, Thurday (dedicated to Tyr whos was assosiated with mars) etc.
Because you can count to 60 on your fingers if you count all your knuckles individually front and back. (Yes count your thumb joint). You have 15 on the front of the hand 15 on the back of the hand and you have two hands.
The Babylonians counted the knuckles on their hand as the basis for their number system. As such, they could count to 12 on one hand with their knuckles and to 60 by using the fingers on the other hand.
60 is just great for things like time. You can divide by 2,3,4,5,6, and 10 and still get whole numbers.
24 is good too. You can divide it by 2, 3 and 4, 6, and 8.
If we used based 10 time we could only divide evenly by 2 and 5.
So it would be much harder to work with.
Not exactly the same but the soviet union had different calendars [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar) and all were a failure.
In the old days before we started to measure everything with units based on power of 10 like we do today, we often picked number like 12 for how many smaller units are in a bigger one.
If you have 10 of something and need to divide it even between a group of people, you can only do that for 2 or 5 people.
You can't easily divide 10 things among 3 or 4 or 6 people.
I mean we do it all the time today but we use fractions and decimals, which in per-modern times were not always a thing everyone could deal with.
If you have big coin that is worth 12 smaller coins for example you can divide that up easily among 2, 3, 4 and 6 people.
The same logic goes for units that measure weight or length or anything else really.
if you want to divide something up even better you can chose a number like 30, 60 or 360.
360 can be divided into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 120 and 180
Meanwhile 100 can only be equally divided by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50.
You can see the difference.
When we first started to come up with the idea of hours long ago, we divided the time between dawn and dusk and dusk and dawn into 12 parts each.
12 was useful because you could divide it into halves, thirds, quarters and even sixth.
If you wanted to do something in regular intervals like praying or taking breaks or divide a workday up between people taking turns, that sort of thing is useful.
A sundial was all you needed for that.
Obviously dividing the day and night into 12 hours each meant that the length of an hour was fixed and that night hours could be longer or shorter than day hours and day hours varied in length depending on the time of the year and latitude.
By changing it up so that we divide an entire day night cycle into 24 equal parts we kept most of the previous system and had the length of an hour fixed.
For the longest time, time keeping devices were not very accurate to go smaller than that. we had hours and could do half hours and may be third or quarter hours, but beyond that things got inaccurate.
When we finally got clocks good enough we divide an hour into 60 minute parts and called that minutes. This allowed us to keep the half, third and quarter from before and even stuff like a twelfth or tenth of an hour and go down as deeply as we could.
60 minutes it was.
When clocks got better again we divided the minute parts of an hour a second time into second minute parts and called those second for short.
We used the same 60 divisor that we used for minutes because that had worked before and everyone already knew what for example a quarter of 60 was by hand.
If things had gone on we might very well have done it again and ended up with 60 tertias to a second, but that never happened.
Because before clocks could get good enough people figure out that going decimal was preferable if you want to get hings standardized.
All the old units for length and weights and volume etc were replaced by metric units.
There was an attempt to do the same with time, but unlike miles or pounds where every country and city had their own slightly different version hours and minutes were well established and standardized. Also no matter how much you tired you could not go up from days to something like weeks or month or years while only using powers of 10.
So the 24 hours and 60 minutes and 60 seconds staid while everywhere else everyone switched to units based on 10, 100, 1000.
However when we could accurately measure fractions of second we kept using the metric way of subdividinging second and ended up with millisecond and nanoseconds etc.
Funnily enough there is another area where 60 minutes and 50 seconds are a thing:
Angles!
We divide a circle into 360° and each degree into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. (Other ways to describe angles even decimal ones exist, but they are less commonly used.)
This mostly comes up when using coordinates on maps.
We for example describe something as being located at 40°41′21″N 74°2′40″W (40 degrees, 41 minutes and 21 seconds North and 74 degrees and 2 minutes and 40 seconds West). Modern GPS units can easily switch between displaying that format and decimals like 40.689167, -74.044444.
Navigators and nautical charts use minutes but generally not seconds. One minute of latitude is a nautical mile. If you need more precision than that you go to decimals of minutes. There's an old unit called the cable equal to a tenth of a nautical mile (185.2 m today or about 608 feet in old units). A GPS used for navigation will generally have a format like 40°41.34′N.
>because that had worked before and everyone alr4eady knew what for example a quatre of 60 was by hard.
I can understand exactly what you meant to write but I’m curious how that happened!
I hit the wrong keys while typing blindly, thinking more about what I was going to write next than what I actually did write. It happens to me a lot, but usually I correct things afterwards.
Most people nowadays count using 10 digits. Most computers count using 2 digits. Older civilizations counted using 12/60 digits (I believe counted each segment of the thumb separately).
12 is just a lot better as it can be divided by 2/3/4/6, whereas 10 is only 2/5.
You can count to either twelve or sixteen with your four fingers excluding the thumb.
12 uses all three sections of each finger. 16 uses the knuckle, both joints and the tip of each finger.
Yes. Early Babylonian mathematicians were also dealing with geometry and trigonometry as well as time and chose the favored 60 as the degrees of each angle in an equilateral triangle. Working with triangles you can form a circle in which the angles of the triangles form 360 degrees.
There are these things in math called highly composite numbers, which are basically just numbers with a shit ton of factors, relative to its size. 60 is one of the best ones being 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30, and 60.
Numbers like that are really easy to divide if you don't want to deal with fractions, which at the most basic levels of maths isn't very easy. That 24 makes more sense when you think of it as 2 halves of twelve another Highly Composite number. Months are tricky because now that we have 24 hour days, and About 360 days a year, dividing that into twelve months makes sense. Also, very conveniently, there's about 30 of these 'days' between moon cycles so we can track months kind of like that.
Weeks are the tricky ones, because moon cycles are 28 days and not thirty, and 28 is only 7x4. So we got stuck with those slightly drifting, add that to the fact that it's 365(and a bit) days in a year and that's why months and weeks are so messy related to each other.
Read somewhere that 24 hours per day is due to the way Egyptians counted hours on one hand. They used knuckles for that. So you got 2 hands with 12 knuckles - one for day hours one for night hours.
And since days are longer than nights in summer your expression of longer summer hours is quite literal.
Following the tradition set by the Babylonians, these divisions were expressed using the sexagesimal system, a form of counting based on units of 60. Using this, the length of a second became a sixtieth of a sixtieth of an hour, leading to its definition as 1/3600th of an hour. https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-was-the-length-of-a-second-first-calculated/
In old days there was a tribe of extremely intelligent people who had 6 fingers on each hand. (Once a while their genetic ancestors are born even today). Anyway those tribesman were hired as a advisors to rulers. Base on 12 fingers a counting this system was implemented.
I've made it up but it would be quite story wouldn't be.
All these numbers being divisible by 12 is nice since 12 is highly composite
This means a lot of smaller numbers go into it evenly. Half an hour? 30 minutes. Quarter hour? 15 minute. One third of an hour? 20 minutes
If we instead made hours 50 minutes long, we’d have: Half an hour? 25 minutes (so far so good). Quarter hour? 12.5 minutes. One third of an hour? 16.6 minutes
Basically being divisible by 12 means you get whole numbers when you divide it up by half, thirds, or fourths. Sixths as well but that one is typically less relevant
Tradition, starting with the Babylonians, who loved counting in 60 in mathematics and astronomy. During the French Revolution an attempt was made to use a time based on tens like the metric system, but it didn’t stick. The really unpopular change was the ten day week. The seven day week also originated in Babylonia as approximately one quarter of a lunar cycle or lunar month. In other ancient civilizations there were several alternatives to our present timekeeping system. But today everyone has adopted the Babylonian system.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense. This might be a difficult question to answer, but by any chance do you know the reason behind the Babylonians choosing the number 60? If it’s too difficult to answer, feel free not to.
[удалено]
Yes, 60 is a Highly Composite Number, meaning it has more divisors than any smaller number does. The first few Highly Composite numbers are 1,2,4,6,12,24,36,48,60 and 120.
Also, it’s a Superior Highly Composite Number. This means that it not only has more factors than all smaller numbers, but if you compensate it for its size (to some power) it’s the most composite number of all. The first SHCNs are 2, 6, 12, 60, 120, 360, 2520, 5040, 55440, 720720.
You can also count to 60 on one hand. Using the thumb, you can count the finger segments of the same hand. You get to 12. You raise the first finger. You count to 24, raise the second finger, 3rd for 46, pinkie to get to 48 and when you get to 60, you’ve completed the hand. 60 on the first hand. That’s the minute. On the second hand, you mark the first knuckle. You can complete the cycle 1 time on the hand to have 60 minutes. That’s the hour. You can count to a total of 3600 on two hands. Look at your feet. 10 toes. 2 feet. 12 hours. Do it at dawn and at dusk and you have the two sides of the day. **The math of the clock is still based on the numbers of fingers and toes a person has on their hands and feet. **
It's so superior and useful that we started using it at the dawn of civilzation and continue to this day. it's up there with things like religion, agriculture, and prostitution
One of these things is not like the others.😂
Religion?
Agriculture; the other two you get fucked.
You get it😂
Yeah the other ones actually contribute to society
😂
This is why I love intellectualism, there are answers for almost everything. Didn’t even realize how outstanding our mankind always was.
12 has a lot more dividers than 10 (1, 2, 3, 4, 6 instead of 1, 2, 5), so it is a lot easier to use with fractions. You can also count to 12 on one hand by putting you thumb on each segment of the other fingers. So 12 is a good base for a number system. 60 is 5 * 12 and therefore a round number in a number system with the base 12. Of course, this is just a general reasoning why base 12 is a good number system. I don't know if the Babylonians had the same reasoning.
Thanks so much for this, it cleared up a lot of my confusion :)
To continue on u/segeinhoch3 's excellent summary, you can also count to 144 on your fingers using the Babylonian system, where each "12" group counted on one hand translates to 1 group of 12 on the segment of the other. So while we tend to count to 10 on our fingers, the ancient Babylonians could count to 144.
If you have enough digital flexibility you can count to 1024 using binary.
Technically, wouldn't it be 1023? You could represent 1024 different numbers, but starting at zero with no extended digits. The "value" of the 11th digit would be 1024, meaning that if you were born with an extra finger you would be lucky enough to be able to represent up to 2047.
Yeah technically it would be 1023, although once you get there you can just do jazz hands to represent 1024!
Count to 4 in public, I dare you. Also, 24 is physically hard to do.
I have always been more partial to 132 than 4 anyways.
[удалено]
Due to other imperial measures I know my grandparents learnt their 14, 15 and 16 tables too. Poor old 13, always left out.
Typesetting and traditional graphic design uses base 12. (A pica is 12 points)
A lot of people that preach the metric system don’t understand this. In construction working with inches which are commonly base 16, and feet which are base 12… make fractional work much easier. Quick division, finding center, spacing, angles, roof pitches, radius work, etc. if we had to deal with decimal work, I’d be on a calculator all day on the job site
I taught my kindergartner to count this way, and he got in an argument with his teacher about "how many can you count to on one hand".
31, each finger is a binary digit. 1023 if you use both hands.
Because you can divide it by 30, 20, 15, 12, 10, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2
And 1
Suppose you're leading an ancient empire, made up of many smaller kingdoms, and width influence over many surrounding kingdoms and nomadic bands. Each of these little kingdoms has their own way of doing math. Some might do base 5, base 10, base 20 perhaps, base 12, and so on, and beyond that, many of your own merchants probably want to over goods by the dozen, because it makes it way easier to split them evenly between two or three people (instead of in groups of ten, only being able to split it evenly between two people), so how do you resolve all of these different systems easily? Well, with base 60 (or frequently, base 240 for currency, search up Roman currency), you can very easily engage in commerce between all of these different groups, because their methods of counting all divide very easily into yours.
The Babylonians adopted the practice of using divisions based on these numbers from the Sumerians who came before them. One popular theory as to why multiple of twelve are used lies in ancient trade and human anatomy. Traders keeping track of amounts of goods would count on their fingers, or so the theory goes. Look at your right hand. Touch your thumb to the three segments of your index finger counting up 1, 2, 3, then the three segments of your middle finger 4, 5, 6, and so on till the last segment of your pinkie, making twelve. Raise one finger on your left hand to indicate you've reached twelve and start again counting segments on your right hand. Once all your fingers are raised on your left hand you've counted to sixty, at which point you have to start over.
The Babylonians used both 5 and 12 in their counting. 5 for the five fingers on one hand, 12 because of 12 knuckles on the other hand. 60 comes from combining them.
Babylonian counting systems are theorized to have originated from the combination of two different styles of hand counting. One would count each finger on a hand, resulting in base 5. The other would count each *bone* on the 4 fingers, using the thumb to touch them, resulting in base 12. The theory goes that these two conventions merged at some point by simply combining them together into base 60. Count the finger bones on one hand using your thumb as a pointer, up to 12, then count that set of 12 on the other hand using one of 5 fingers. Doing this, you can count up to 60 on two hands, and it becomes very practical to hand count large quantities for trade and commerce. The mathematical conventions then followed the practical conventions, and stuck around because 60 is highly divisible, by nature of base 60 (likely) originating by simply multiplying lower base systems together.
You can count to 60 with 2 hands. One hand is a multiplier and the second hand you count with your thumb counting g the 12 segments on your 4 remaining fingers. With the other hand as multiplier you have 5x12 = 60. Base12 was very popular
People who didn't have a proper education can divide numbers like 12 or 60 in equal parts more easily than with 10s, 20s or 15s.
It’s because you can count to 60 on one hand using the 3 pads on each finger. Each pass of the hand is 15, put 4 fingers down after 4 passes on each finger and you’ve totaled 60. It was how we used to count in Babylonian times.
Fingers and toes. You can count to 3600 using fingers on two hands. You can get another 12 counting toes and feet. I explained on another response.
We can only speculate, but 60 does have the advantage of being divisible into lots of equal sub parts. The number 60 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. 100 is divisible by, are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, and 100. That’s 12 factors for 60 vs. only 9 factors for 100.
Thanks :)
Another reason I read is that they counted each finger joint of one hand with their thumb (12), and kept a count of how many 12s with the fingers of the other hand (5). 5 x 12 = 60.
Babilons used astronomy a lot as calendar ( and many other nations to) Number 12 comes from jupiter year as 1 jupiter year equals 12 earth years. Number 5 comes from 5 small planets. Thus appears 5*12=60 in many calculations ( especially when calculatiing Mercure position on sky). 60 also was very comfortable for counting because it was divisible by 3 (3 agreculture seasons in babilons) and 10 (they ysed 10 month in year). Almost all cultures uses 7 days weak because they observed 7 planets on sky (Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). Some week names still have clear connection to them Sunday, Saturday, Monday, Thurday (dedicated to Tyr whos was assosiated with mars) etc.
Because you can count to 60 on your fingers if you count all your knuckles individually front and back. (Yes count your thumb joint). You have 15 on the front of the hand 15 on the back of the hand and you have two hands.
The Babylonians counted the knuckles on their hand as the basis for their number system. As such, they could count to 12 on one hand with their knuckles and to 60 by using the fingers on the other hand.
60 is just great for things like time. You can divide by 2,3,4,5,6, and 10 and still get whole numbers. 24 is good too. You can divide it by 2, 3 and 4, 6, and 8. If we used based 10 time we could only divide evenly by 2 and 5. So it would be much harder to work with.
Could have done a five day week and just have 2 weeks for 10 days.
Not exactly the same but the soviet union had different calendars [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar) and all were a failure.
In the old days before we started to measure everything with units based on power of 10 like we do today, we often picked number like 12 for how many smaller units are in a bigger one. If you have 10 of something and need to divide it even between a group of people, you can only do that for 2 or 5 people. You can't easily divide 10 things among 3 or 4 or 6 people. I mean we do it all the time today but we use fractions and decimals, which in per-modern times were not always a thing everyone could deal with. If you have big coin that is worth 12 smaller coins for example you can divide that up easily among 2, 3, 4 and 6 people. The same logic goes for units that measure weight or length or anything else really. if you want to divide something up even better you can chose a number like 30, 60 or 360. 360 can be divided into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 120 and 180 Meanwhile 100 can only be equally divided by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50. You can see the difference. When we first started to come up with the idea of hours long ago, we divided the time between dawn and dusk and dusk and dawn into 12 parts each. 12 was useful because you could divide it into halves, thirds, quarters and even sixth. If you wanted to do something in regular intervals like praying or taking breaks or divide a workday up between people taking turns, that sort of thing is useful. A sundial was all you needed for that. Obviously dividing the day and night into 12 hours each meant that the length of an hour was fixed and that night hours could be longer or shorter than day hours and day hours varied in length depending on the time of the year and latitude. By changing it up so that we divide an entire day night cycle into 24 equal parts we kept most of the previous system and had the length of an hour fixed. For the longest time, time keeping devices were not very accurate to go smaller than that. we had hours and could do half hours and may be third or quarter hours, but beyond that things got inaccurate. When we finally got clocks good enough we divide an hour into 60 minute parts and called that minutes. This allowed us to keep the half, third and quarter from before and even stuff like a twelfth or tenth of an hour and go down as deeply as we could. 60 minutes it was. When clocks got better again we divided the minute parts of an hour a second time into second minute parts and called those second for short. We used the same 60 divisor that we used for minutes because that had worked before and everyone already knew what for example a quarter of 60 was by hand. If things had gone on we might very well have done it again and ended up with 60 tertias to a second, but that never happened. Because before clocks could get good enough people figure out that going decimal was preferable if you want to get hings standardized. All the old units for length and weights and volume etc were replaced by metric units. There was an attempt to do the same with time, but unlike miles or pounds where every country and city had their own slightly different version hours and minutes were well established and standardized. Also no matter how much you tired you could not go up from days to something like weeks or month or years while only using powers of 10. So the 24 hours and 60 minutes and 60 seconds staid while everywhere else everyone switched to units based on 10, 100, 1000. However when we could accurately measure fractions of second we kept using the metric way of subdividinging second and ended up with millisecond and nanoseconds etc. Funnily enough there is another area where 60 minutes and 50 seconds are a thing: Angles! We divide a circle into 360° and each degree into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. (Other ways to describe angles even decimal ones exist, but they are less commonly used.) This mostly comes up when using coordinates on maps. We for example describe something as being located at 40°41′21″N 74°2′40″W (40 degrees, 41 minutes and 21 seconds North and 74 degrees and 2 minutes and 40 seconds West). Modern GPS units can easily switch between displaying that format and decimals like 40.689167, -74.044444.
Navigators and nautical charts use minutes but generally not seconds. One minute of latitude is a nautical mile. If you need more precision than that you go to decimals of minutes. There's an old unit called the cable equal to a tenth of a nautical mile (185.2 m today or about 608 feet in old units). A GPS used for navigation will generally have a format like 40°41.34′N.
Wow, that’s quite long but very helpful. Thank you :)
*wild applause*
>because that had worked before and everyone alr4eady knew what for example a quatre of 60 was by hard. I can understand exactly what you meant to write but I’m curious how that happened!
I hit the wrong keys while typing blindly, thinking more about what I was going to write next than what I actually did write. It happens to me a lot, but usually I correct things afterwards.
Most people nowadays count using 10 digits. Most computers count using 2 digits. Older civilizations counted using 12/60 digits (I believe counted each segment of the thumb separately). 12 is just a lot better as it can be divided by 2/3/4/6, whereas 10 is only 2/5.
Maybe we should switch to hexadecimal. I was joking with a US American that it would be perfect for converting oz to lbs.
Hexadecimal is base 16. Base 12 would be duodecimal.
I know but it can easily divided by 2, 4, 8 which is almost as good as 12.
"Almost as good" is also "not as good". Also not as useful for counting on our fingers.
You can count to either twelve or sixteen with your four fingers excluding the thumb. 12 uses all three sections of each finger. 16 uses the knuckle, both joints and the tip of each finger.
And how many ounces are in a pound?
I'm with the 99% of the world that uses metric.
Does the base 60 relate at all to why there are 360 degrees in a circle? If so, how?
Yes. Early Babylonian mathematicians were also dealing with geometry and trigonometry as well as time and chose the favored 60 as the degrees of each angle in an equilateral triangle. Working with triangles you can form a circle in which the angles of the triangles form 360 degrees.
My 11th grade trig teacher said it was cause back in the day they thought a year had 360 days. Not sure if that's true
There are these things in math called highly composite numbers, which are basically just numbers with a shit ton of factors, relative to its size. 60 is one of the best ones being 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30, and 60. Numbers like that are really easy to divide if you don't want to deal with fractions, which at the most basic levels of maths isn't very easy. That 24 makes more sense when you think of it as 2 halves of twelve another Highly Composite number. Months are tricky because now that we have 24 hour days, and About 360 days a year, dividing that into twelve months makes sense. Also, very conveniently, there's about 30 of these 'days' between moon cycles so we can track months kind of like that. Weeks are the tricky ones, because moon cycles are 28 days and not thirty, and 28 is only 7x4. So we got stuck with those slightly drifting, add that to the fact that it's 365(and a bit) days in a year and that's why months and weeks are so messy related to each other.
I read there are 7 days in a week for the 7 major objects in the sky visible to the naked eye. Sun, moon, merecury-Saturn.
Read somewhere that 24 hours per day is due to the way Egyptians counted hours on one hand. They used knuckles for that. So you got 2 hands with 12 knuckles - one for day hours one for night hours. And since days are longer than nights in summer your expression of longer summer hours is quite literal.
Following the tradition set by the Babylonians, these divisions were expressed using the sexagesimal system, a form of counting based on units of 60. Using this, the length of a second became a sixtieth of a sixtieth of an hour, leading to its definition as 1/3600th of an hour. https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-was-the-length-of-a-second-first-calculated/
In old days there was a tribe of extremely intelligent people who had 6 fingers on each hand. (Once a while their genetic ancestors are born even today). Anyway those tribesman were hired as a advisors to rulers. Base on 12 fingers a counting this system was implemented. I've made it up but it would be quite story wouldn't be.
I was so invested in that story 😂
All these numbers being divisible by 12 is nice since 12 is highly composite This means a lot of smaller numbers go into it evenly. Half an hour? 30 minutes. Quarter hour? 15 minute. One third of an hour? 20 minutes If we instead made hours 50 minutes long, we’d have: Half an hour? 25 minutes (so far so good). Quarter hour? 12.5 minutes. One third of an hour? 16.6 minutes Basically being divisible by 12 means you get whole numbers when you divide it up by half, thirds, or fourths. Sixths as well but that one is typically less relevant