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Mar. 17, 2011 Who invented seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months and years? Was it a Greek philosopher, a Christian saint, an Arab astronomer or an African chieftain? I have no idea; the history of these absurdities does not interest me at all. It is distressing, though, that seconds have been made the unit of time used in the Metric System. What, pray, is a second anyway? What connection does it have with ordinary reality? None, as far as I can tell, but it's way too late to do anything about it. If someone had asked me to set the rules for chronometry for planet earth and for the Metric System, I would have gotten rid of the six aforesaid units immediately. I would also have abolished AM, PM, BC, AD, DST and time zones. It all seems so easy that I cannot imagine why the natural system of chronometry has not been instituted already. My sole unit would have been the civil day, 24 hours. The only units that depend on ordinary reality are the day and the year, but they are incommensurable, so unless you accept two systems, one has to go, and, in my opinion, that should have been the year. Longer periods of time can be measured in day-hundreds, day-thousands, day-myriads, etc. Most people know the approximate dates and months of the beginnings of the seasons, and this ready knowledge would be lost. One would have to consult a calendar to learn the day of the beginning of spring, for example. Also birthdays and anniversaries, for whatever good they are, would be lost. We would have to celebrate day-hundreds or day-thousands instead. Any conservative individual who wanted to observe old-fashioned birthdays, etc., would have to use a calendar. If you work five days a week, you could just shift to 7 days out of 10. A tenth of a day, two hours and twenty-four minutes, would be .1 day. A hundredth of a day, fourteen minutes and twenty-four seconds, would be .01 day. A thousandth of a day, one minute and 26.4 seconds, would be .001 days, and so forth, ad infinitum. We might call such units decidays, centidays and millidays. Let us suppose that today were day 150. Then we have 150.00 for this morning at midnight, 150.25 for 6 AM, 150.50 for noon and 150.75 for 6 PM. Two-decimal place accuracy would often be convenient, as in, “I'll see you at 150.76”, i.e., day 150 at around a quarter past six PM. If you needed greater accuracy, it would be available; 150.752 would be day 150, time 6:02 + 53 seconds PM. For historic time, I would use a much earlier watershed than the birth of Christ to demarcate negative and positive time, with the idea that all historical time be made positive. If we set Christ's birth say at day 5,000,000, we would have a continuous succession of positive cardinal numbers from before the time of the Pharaohs up to the present and beyond. Let us suppose that today were day 6,251,812, we could just shorten this to 812 when talking about the immediate past and future, just as people now say May 15, without reciting the year. BC and AD would just disappear. Geologic time uses BP, before the present, but numbers would grow considerably. A million years would become 365,000,000 days. No longer would we have to figure out what day of the week the 29th fell on. We would no longer sit down with pencil and paper to figure out the number of days between February 11 and May 17. Instead of using time zones, I would use Greenwich Mean Time all over the planet. People in London might work from .4 to .7 and people in New York City might work from .6 to .9. The numerical time would not have any connotation of morning, noon or night. The people in any locale would get used to their own schedule, of course. They would know whether .4, .7 or .9 was the approximate time of sunup. So if a man in Antofagasta is supposed to call a man in Antananarivo at 150.76, there is only one 150.76 all over the planet, come summer, winter or whatever. The only drawback is that the man from Chile won't know whether it's day or night in Madagascar, but he doesn't need a wall full of clocks. 150.76 is 150.76. The Metric System's failure to deal with a sensible chronometry was discussed even at the time of the French Revolution, but nothing was ever done. So the Metric system, like its predecessor, is fatally flawed. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written five books: ELEMENTS OF GRAMMAR and A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction); A TALE OF UNG, THE ENNUNMENT and GVAGMA (fiction). I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com
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