Why A Minute Has 60 Seconds Instead Of 100? Here’s The Actual Reason Behind This

If you ever had a question of such kind, then it is appreciable because you just tried to interpret the basic logic by which very basic subjects like our age is measured.

Many measurements are based on the movement of the Sun, the religious beliefs and other customs. There are 7 days in a week, 3 gods in one, and 60 units in a minute/hour because of religious ‘lucky’ number traditions. Other measures, like a ‘foot’, etc. are because of convenience as per records.

Meanwhile, the things divided by 100, comes from the invention of the zero and the logical concept of a placeholder for numbers. The French established the meter and divided it by 100, and we’ve been making things work with 100 ever since.

However, there is a 5000 years old story behind adopting 60 instead of 100,

The second is these days defined within the metric SI system in terms of the vibration of a Caesium atom, which is a constant It is NOT defined as a fraction of a year, which is not a constant but varies in length (which is why leap seconds have to occasionally be added to it).

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.

Mankind started measuring time long before the decimal system became prevalent. Seafarers needed to know the time at sea for navigation purposes, the night was divided into 12 subdivisions, corresponding to the 12 signs of the Zodiac and it seemed only logical to do the same for the days,

The Babylonian civilisation was at its peak 4,000 years ago (in territory corresponding to modern-day Iraq) ie before the Greeks and Egyptian civilisations became very developed and what the Babylonians developed a system of weights and measurements was widely copied and adopted.

The Babylonian sexagesimal system (base 60) gave us 360 degrees in a circle, 60 minutes to a degree and 60 seconds to a minute, The same subdivisions were applied to hours as well as degrees. They operated a 360-day calendar too (with 12 months of 30 days each) and once every 6 years added a 13th month, also of 30 days, to get the calendar and the seasons back in synch again.

Now, according to the updating world, we didn’t convert few more measurements like 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard, rather than 100 centimetres in a meter.

FacebookTwitterInstagramPinterestLinkedInGoogle+YoutubeRedditDribbbleBehanceGithubCodePenEmailWhatsappEmail
×
facebook
Hit “Like” to follow us and receive latest news