How many metres in a kilometre? 1000. How many millilitres in a litre? 1000. How many seconds in a day? Not quite so easy is it. Well, there are 86 400 seconds in a day (depending on your definition of a day but that a whole other thing). Surely there is a simpler, more logical method to represent time. Well yes, there are many forms of decimal time such as swatch time, or french revolution time. French revolution time splits each day up into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds so a day will have 100 000 seconds. This is great for many reasons, Firstly our culture has developed an understanding of the decimal which is system much easier than the base 12/base 60 mess of time system. This will also avoid confusions like “I’ll get there by 7” and no one knowing if they mean 7 am or pm. Of course, we could just use 24hr time rather than “am pm” but few people do and it hardly makes any more sense. The idea of decimal time is not new. In fact, it was part of the original decimal system, but countries which chose to adopt the metric system decided to drop the time component.
Although it’s a cool and interesting idea, I doubt it will become widespread since there are so many systems which we currently use which rely on it such as the stock market, GPS, time zones, computers, cryptocurrencies, and much more. So, sadly we are stuck with a terrible system.
Science Scholars 2019 