Sexagesimal time

Part of my units pages

Base distractions

Decimal time, briefly adopted by France, was a notable attempt to apply metric principles to time. However, it is a case of the metric red herring, since the main advantages of metric don’t come from using base 10.

10 isn’t a particularly good choice of base, but we’re largely stuck with it in most areas, for historical reasons. However, time measurement is an exception, since we’ve inherited the base 60 system of the Babylonians; which I would argue is preferable, due to having more factors than 10.

Time is already coherent

The main problem with the system of hours, minutes and seconds is that we seem to have three units of time, which is not coherent. It would be better to have single unit, and multiply that as needed.

In fact, the current system already provides this! The hour is its single unit of time, with the minute as a multiple of one-sixtieth: in Latin this was a “minuta” or “pars minuta prima” (meaning “fraction”, “small part” or “first small part”). A minute of a minute is a “pars minuta secunda” (“second small part”) which we abbreviate to “second”. This system goes on, with a minute of a second being a “minuta tertia” (or in English, a “third”), etc.

The naming is nice and logical, akin to the “billion”, “trillion”, “quadrillion”, etc. used for large numbers. Despite mostly being used for time, these multipliers are actually generic, since they’re also used for angles, with one degree containing 60 arcminutes, each of which contains 60 arcseconds.

Divisions or multiples

I claim coherent time should be based on secs, in which case we need names for the minute and hour which multiply rather than divide. If we use the sexagesimal multipliers from prefix factors we would have: