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girldrumme... girldrumm...
 
January 06, 2009 05:44 AM

Why isn't there a metric version of time keeping?

All you have to do is prepare payroll to know how much metric hours and days would simplify things. This is an offbeat question, a little silly, but with a kernal of truth.
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steepdecli... steepdecli...
 
 January 06, 2009 07:29 AM
You might be interested to learn (i was) that Swatch came up with a variation of metric time, or internet time, by which everyone around the world would be at the same time, or "beat". It also happens to be somewhat decimal friendly as it is based on 1000 beats in a day.

Swatch Internet Time was a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Asker's Rating:
• There were good answers, but this one went beyond a quick answer to a fun and fascinating story. Thanks for telling me about Swatch time!


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answerman answerman
 
January 06, 2009 05:51 AM
I'm fairly sure scientists use things like: nanoseconds, kiloseconds, megaseconds, and 5.7E-47 seconds all of the time.

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theeskimo theeskimo
 
January 06, 2009 05:04 PM
Normal time is metric time. The SI unit for time is seconds, and, like answerman said, you can use prefixes like nano, kilo, etc. If you were using metric time, you would technically not use minutes or hours, just seconds.

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whiskeybra... whiskeybra...
 
January 07, 2009 02:31 PM
The Second was effectively made "metric" in 1967 when it's definition was broken away from the solar day or the year and tied to atomic phase transitions. It is now precisely defined as:

"the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom"

But I get your point. It is somewhat odd that the SI did not truly redefine time units that are commonly used.
Source(s):
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/second.html


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