Recent postings on this subject have raised some good points
highlighting the impracticality and/or futility of decimalising time.
SI is universal. It works anywhere in space and time: here in New York
in January 2006, on the summit of K2, at the bottom of the Mariana
Trench, in orbit, on the surface of the moon, in deep space and in the
Andromeda galaxy, yesterday, next week and next millenium.
From a universal perspective, the length of a second need not be tied
to the rotation of one particular planet. If we were invent a new
"decimal" second such that there are 100 000 or 240 000 seconds in a day
then would Mars colonists be justified inventing their own slightly
longer version to accommodate Mars's longer day? Would we have
different "local" seconds on Earth, Mars and Titan? Which second would
be used on the moon or by travellerSurely that is a silly idea yet it
follows inevitiably from such parochial thinking.
On the same lines, the metre may have been defined originally as one
forty millionth of the polar circumference of the earth but now it has a
universal definition in terms of the distance travelled in a vacuum by
light in a certain fraction of a second. The current definition happens
to be very close to the original but the connection between the standard
unit of length and the size of one particular planet has been broken.
- [USMA:35684] Re: decimal time Jon Saxton
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