Time

[Myomoto-08]

Ooer, this is intriguing;



Too urgh omg.

Wow that is just confusing I don't think my brain can handle all this haha

[Inseriousity.]

Lol I asked my RE teacher at college once the same thing. They got very confused with me. It's not just you, I think of things like this all the time. Time, dates, what did they use before christianity (we use BC/AD) and things like that.

[Myomoto-08]

Lol I asked my RE teacher at college once the same thing. They got very confused with me. It's not just you, I think of things like this all the time. Time, dates, what did they use before christianity (we use BC/AD) and things like that.

lol that makes me feel better knowing I am not the only one baffled by this

[iBlueBox]

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

[FlyingJesus]

How can you know that the sun took 365 days to circle the sun when you don't know how long a day lasted.

Well a day is the one that's the easiest, as that's the rotation of the planet on its axis, and the passing of a day is something that you can actually see happening. Of all the timeframes in question, that one's the most simple to comprehend even without any mathematical or scientific knowledge

As for how we split a day, 24 hours is down to the ancient Egyptians and Indians who measured most units in terms of relativity to the number 12 (rather than multiples and derivatives of 10 as modern metric units tend to use), so each day and night was split into 12 parts apiece and followed patterns in certain stars, which actually meant that originally hours would have a different length according to the season, which was fine for an agricultural lifestyle but then the Greeks decided that fixed hours would be better so that they could use them mathematically to display various theories - but this was only used for the philosopher classes, and labourers would still use the old seasonal methods. The idea of fixed hours for the masses regardless of season only actually came about when mechanical clocks began being manufactured in the 14th century, but the concept has been there for millennia.

Not entirely sure about 60 minutes/seconds but I think that's also got an astronomical background, I'll have a look in a sec to see what I can find on it

[GommeInc]

Not entirely sure about 60 minutes/seconds but I think that's also got an astronomical background, I'll have a look in a sec to see what I can find on it

The Babylonians used a sexitecimal system rather than a decimal system. I can't find how they got to 60 though.

http://www.math.wichita.edu/history/...tml#babylonian

As per usual, a good post Nicely simplified.

EDIT: They measured time with a sun/water clock. So I hazard a guess as to say that they may of made a sundial and measured the distance the sun had travelled in a day and put it alongside numbers of 6, and calculated the distance the sun would of travelled at night and got a near-accurate reading.

[Kardan]

365 days was chosen because thats how long it takes to circle the sun.
24 hours was chosen as thats how long it takes for the moon to circle the earth.
1 hour / 60 minutes minutes was chosen because it was a simple way to calculate up to the very top. ^
1 minute was chosen because it was a simple way to calculate up to the very top. ^
1 second was chosen because it was a simple way to calculate up to the very top. ^


This is my opinion why it'd be that.

24 hours is how long for the moon to go around the Earth?

Are you being serious? That's so wrong...

A year was created to mark a full rotation around the sun, and days were created to mark a full rotation of the Earth's axis, I'm assuming that hours and minutes were just random sub divisions of a day that someone created down the line, simple really

And to the earlier question of what would time be if everything stopped, then it would be nothing. Time is just a relative measurement, so for the relativeness to become nothing, then time wouldn't exist.

[FlyingJesus]

The Babylonians used a sexitecimal system rather than a decimal system. I can't find how they got to 60 though.

http://www.math.wichita.edu/history/...tml#babylonian

As per usual, a good post Nicely simplified.

EDIT: They measured time with a sun/water clock. So I hazard a guess as to say that they may of made a sundial and measured the distance the sun had travelled in a day and put it alongside numbers of 6, and calculated the distance the sun would of travelled at night and got a near-accurate reading.

Christ that numerical system seems ridiculously complicated even for scholars, the same symbol can mean either 60 or 1 glad we use the Arabic system, and thank all the gods in history that the Indians thought to invent zero after a while haha

And no matter where I look I can't find an actual reason for the Babylonians using 60 as a base, trust them to be bloody mysterious about everything

[Kardan]

Christ that numerical system seems ridiculously complicated even for scholars, the same symbol can mean either 60 or 1 glad we use the Arabic system, and thank all the gods in history that the Indians thought to invent zero after a while haha

And no matter where I look I can't find an actual reason for the Babylonians using 60 as a base, trust them to be bloody mysterious about everything

I read somewhere that it was the mesopotamians that created the minute and the second interval as they had an obsession with the number 60, you can probably find out if that's true or not with a google search

[FlyingJesus]

Babylon was the capital of Mesopotamia *+*strutz thru ancient iraq*+* and yeah there's all sorts of pages saying that it's because they used 60 as a base, but no-one with a real idea of why other than because they felt like it lol