We can lament that the decimal time introduced by the French never caught
on, and that Gauss and later scientists chose the second as the base unit
for a coherent system. But we're stuck with it now. Without the second, SI
would cease to exist.
We can't avoid the natural time units, day and year, so people must learn
that d = 86.4 ks and a = 31.6 Ms and do clumsy conversions. We can, however,
avoid expressing quantities with the artificial hours and minutes (e.g., use
m/s or L/s, not km/h or L/min), except or course when dealing with the time
of day.
Time is the first quantity that children learn to measure--in pre-school,
even before length. It takes them years to master the ridiculous Babylonian
system and analog clock, which are much more difficult than feet and inches
or ounces and pounds. We could, I suppose, express the time of day in das,
hs, or ks. But the Babylonian system is so engrained and universal that I
don't think we'll ever root it out. My international students, who are
justifiably amused by our irrational American units, nonetheless see nothing
irrational or inconvenient about our time units--even when you ask them to
add 6 d 3 h 18 min 43 s + 5 d 18 h 29 min 17 s and it takes them half a
period to do it!
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Ma Be
> Sent: 2000 December 1 Friday 09:57
> To: U.S. Metric Association
> Subject: [USMA:9482] Re: Babylonian units
>
>
> On Fri, 1 Dec 2000 09:00:29 Dennis Brownridge wrote:
> ...The second of time is one of the
> >major weaknesses of SI, but it's too late to change now.
> >...
> While I agreed with nearly everything you said in this post, I
> unfortunately cannot on this one above. I still honestly and
> sincerely do not think that it's too late for a change there.
>
> True, the best solution to fix this might be to redefine the
> second to a .864 fraction of the current one, i.e. to make it
> "faster" (this would evidently entail changes in a host of other
> time-related units, I know... But I'm focusing on this from a
> theoretical point of view).
>
> But I'd be happy to also consider keeping the second as is while
> changing time's framework from a 24-60-60 one to some "near"
> decimal alternative. In that regard I consider the "swatch time"
> proposal a rather interesting one.
> I'm rooting for it to... "hold" or be successful. Who knows if
> we might eventually "switch" to using a "beat" as an official
> unit of time (I know, I know, it would wreak havoc just the same,
> but this is at least a proposal which is on the table and that
> may have a better chance to "succeed" at fixing some "time woes"
> than to consider the redefinition of time as .864 of the "old"
> second. BTW, who knows if this may not trigger CGPM to
> reconsider meddling into this affair of time... again, "for the
> first time", and finally come up with an SI version 2.0... :-) ).
>
> Marcus
>
>
> Angelfire for your free web-based e-mail. http://www.angelfire.com
>
>
