Re: measuring systems (was: Selenites)

At 10:06 PM 9/27/98 +0100, Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>At 1:30 pm -0400 27/9/98, J.A. Mills wrote:
>>Also, from Ray's information, I gather that the basic
>>building block of time--the second-- remained unchanged.  Was that perhaps due
>>to the inability to adjust the timepieces of the time (unlikely, huh?).
>
>Yes, unlikely by that time.  I believe there was, infact, a proposal to
>divide the day (i.e. from midnight to midnight) into 10ths, 100ths, 1000ths
>etc.  It's quite feasible, of course.  But here the revolutionaries were up
>against a tradition of more than 3000 years.
>
>Weights, measures of capacity & linear measures were a mess - each country
>having their own system (& often more than one system), so a change to a
>single, simple unified system was fairly readily accepted; but to change a
>system that was a few thousand years old & more or less universally adopted
>proved to be quite a different matter.
>
>>It
>>just seems like a half-baked effort.  IUnderstand the difficulty in a
>>democratic society of changing over to the metric system, but at least the
>>metric system exists.
>
>But the revolution didn't remain democratic - along came Boney, and
>changing time systems was not high on his agenda!
>
>>After all this time (ha ha), why doesn't a better time
>>system exist?
>
>Conservatism.
You're probably right about why the inventors of the metric system didn't
also decimalize the measurement of time, but there's another reason why it
would be almost impossible to do so now.  The second is now one of the basic
units of the metric system, and many other units are derived from it.  For
example, force is measured in newtons (kilogram meters per second squared),
energy is measured in joules (newton meters, or kilogram meters squared per
second squared), power is measured in watts (joules per second), etc.  If
the second were replaced by, say, a 100,000th of a day (0.864 seconds), all
those derived units would also have to be replaced.
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
-- The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)