Decimal Time

Decimal Time

As an American, I have always been a bit ambivalent when it comes to units of measurement. I learned units like inches, pints, and pounds first, but all through elementary and secondary school, the metric system( or S. I., Système International) was taught, along with dire warnings that we’d better get used to the new measurements because the U. S. was going to be giving up Imperial units Real Soon Now. That would have been fine with me, because I’m fluent in meters, liters, and grams too, and they all make more sense to me than their Imperial counterparts. ( Temperature, strangely, is the exception: I can’t seem to switch my brain out of Fahrenheit.) The entire world— excluding us wacky Americans— has come to the sane conclusion that units of measurement based on outdated and arbitrary standards should be abandoned, and that everything should be based on easy- to- calculate units of ten.

Everything, that is, except time, the measurement of which requires dealing in inconvenient quantities such as60, 12, 7, 365, 31, 30, 28, and every so often, 29 and366. Why shouldn’t time be measured in units of10, 100, and1000? Seconds, hours, weeks, and months, after all, are simply arbitrary divisions of days, seasons, and years. Why not divide them up in a decimal- friendly way? And why not choose a system that is inherently immune from stupid computer glitches on the one hand, and free from religious biases on the other? It turns out that there have been numerous proposals to do exactly that.

Days( and Years) of Our Lives

Let’s back up a bit and consider a few basics. Everyone agrees that time measurements should be based on regular, observable phenomena such as the dependable fact that the sun rises and sets every day, and that the Earth’s position relative to the sun follows predictable, year- long cycles. One could argue that the notion of a“ day” having a fixed duration is a bit of a fiction, since the hours of sunlight vary according to season and latitude, but I think most people are content taking an average( i. e., a mean solar day) as the rule. And of course there’s the whole leap year problem, but that need not hold up an entire timekeeping revolution. Though the idea of a“ day” and“ year” are with us to stay, however, all the other units— seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, and months( and even seasons, depending on where you live)— are arbitrary divisions that are ripe for revision.

The first serious attempt to slice up the clock and calendar decimally happened in France as a consequence of the French Revolution. The new government instituted a republican calendar that consisted of12 months of30 days each, months bearing names suggestive of the season in which they fell( but only, of course, in France). An extra five days of festivities were added at the end of each year( not part of any month) to make the solar cycle work out. Each month consisted of three“ dekades,” or10- day weeks. New clocks had to be designed and built, too. A day now had10 hours; hours had100 minutes, and minutes had100 seconds. Because the months were not that much different from existing months( breaking the strict unit- of-10 rule), they were relatively easy to get used to. But having a“ minute” that was almost a minute and a half long, and an“ hour” that lasted almost two and a half hours, was too much. The republican government fought a losing battle to institute the new timekeeping system from1793 until1805, when it was finally abandoned.

Over the years, numerous other proposals have been advanced for dividing time into units of10, with the common thread being that there’s always a basic unit of time( whether or not it’s called an“ hour”) that lasts1/10 of a day. To deal with the problem of that being a rather unwieldy period of time, smaller units have been proposed, such as the“ centiday” or“ decihour,” which would be1/100 of a day, or about14 minutes according to current measures. Multiples of2 and4 centidays are close enough to current half- hours and hours to give a reasonable means of making mental conversions.

Beat It

One exception to the“ centiday” solution is Internet Time, a standard promoted by Swiss watchmaker Swatch. In Swatch’s system, the day is divided evenly into1000 units called“. beats”; each. beat lasts1 minute, 26.4 seconds. Internet Time is designed to be universal, rather than local— so if you say an event is going to occur at@435 . beats( which is how Internet Time is notated), that represents a fixed time that works anywhere in the world. Beat0 is defined as midnight in Biel, Switzerland, where the Swatch headquarters is located. The downside to the lack of time zones, of course, is that Internet Time has no consistent relationship to the cycle of the sun; you simply have to memorize what. beat range constitutes periods such as“ morning,” “ afternoon,” and“ evening” in your local area— and then recalculate if you travel.

This illustrates another problem with any decimalized time system: where and when do you start counting from? By international agreement, all time zones around the world are calculated based on Greenwich Mean Time, that is, the time on an arbitrary line of longitude running through Greenwich, England, that we’ve designated the Prime Meridian. But just as Internet Time measures from a different starting point, any decimal time measurement will have to declare some location as the“ starting point,” and either calculate local time zones accordingly or bypass the whole notion of local time as Swatch did and let everyone fend for themselves.

Remembering Z Day

In decimal time schemes that also deal with weeks, months, and years, there’s an even trickier problem. What should count as day0? In other words, let’s say decimal dates were represented as YYYY- MM- DD, with more Y’s added as needed. Which date is0000-01-01? Some would say, sync it up with the Gregorian calendar— but that perpetuates its Christian bias. Others say, pick a date, any date( such as midnight on January1, 2000 or July13, 1903) and just deal with it; presumably, events that occurred before that date would have to be represented with a negative number.

The notion of decimal time appeals to my sense of logic— though it would appeal more if a year were, say, 100 or500 or1000 days long. That would make the math work out much more conveniently. ( Some proposals, by the way, try to divide the year up into100 “ days” of about88 standard hours each, which is better for calculations but considerably worse for human beings.) But if meters and liters are a tough sell in the U. S., metric time is going to be tougher still. Maybe in a century or two… hmmm, century. I guess we use a kind of metric time after all.