Why Don't We Have Metric Time? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by raycon on may 20th 2019 the world changed you probably didn't notice it but the weight of everything in the world became just a little bit different that day that's because the kilogram the standard unit of mass in the metric system got redefined for the first time in 130 years scientists spent five years on this and the reason is because since 1889 the kilogram was defined as the weight of a single platinum iridium cylinder housed in a vault at the international bureau of weights and measures in severe france granted there were copies of it all around the world but that object was the standard it was known as the international prototype kilogram or as its friends called it big k every time you wait apples at a store every shipping container that gets weighed at a checkpoint every building that gets made gets determined ultimately by big k so it was a problem when they realized that big k was shrinking in the time that big k had been the world's definition of a kilogram it had lost 50 micrograms now that's only about the weight of a human eyelash but science sometimes deals in very tiny amounts so that discrepancy matters maybe even harder to wrap your brain around is the fact that this 50 microgram lighter kilogram is still the kilogram so is it is it 50 micrograms of the old kilogram or 50 of the new smaller micrograms of the new my head hurts the point is a standard measurement needs to be unchanging and objects are just going to change over time you know atoms decay elements react there's nothing you can do about it and that's why there's been a push for decades now to update our standards of measurement to universal constants instead of actual things the meter used to be measured the same way it was determined as one millionth the distance from the north pole to the equator but the standard meter was a metal bar until 1983 when they had fixed it to the speed of light the second was affixed to oscillations in the hyperfine transition of a cesium-133 atom but the kilogram that that was a bit more challenging because mass is inherently a property of physical objects and physical objects change so how do you affix a unit of mass to a universal constant their solution was to base it on the planck constant using something called a kibble balance a kibble balance basically figures out how many joules are in something according to the whole equals mz squared thing and the number of joules in a kilogram is 6.62607015 times 10 to the negative 34. it's complicated but it works this democratizes the kilogram basically anybody with an instrument sensitive enough can now determine what a kilogram is you don't have to go to some government body for calibration this finally fulfills the mission of the metric system a system designed for all times for all people the adoption of the metric system changed the world in all kinds of ways but if the founders of metric system had their way it would have changed things even more all the way down to how we keep time [Music] the metric system it's a 200 year old system of measurement designed to bring equality and standardization to the world and to tell whether or not somebody's an american all right let me just say real quick look i i know i use imperial units a lot of times in my videos and every time i do i get angry comments from people all around the world uh calling me an ugly american and stuff like that like just let me let me just say like i don't do it to make some kind of nationalist statement or anything it's just sometimes in the articles that i look up it's in imperial units and i'm just i'm basically just too lazy to convert it that's really what it comes down to so if you could not take it as a personal attack i would appreciate that but to make it up to you today i'm going to talk all about the metric system which actually got its start way earlier than we think it did all the way back in 1670 a french priest and mathematician gabrielle moton proposed a decimal system of measurement he's often considered the founding father of the metric system he based his standard unit of length on one argument of a great circle around the earth he also proposed a unit of length as a pendulum swing length with one beat per second frequency which is around 25 centimeters a couple of years earlier in 1668 an english clergyman by the name of john wilkins had proposed a system to measure area length mass and volume for length he called it the standard and it was a pendulum's length that had a one second half beat volume was a cubic standard area was square and mass was a cubic standard of rainwater the english and french had a friendly working relationship at the time so it's possible that motown and wilkins kind of knew of each other's work for example wilkins ideas included some of the essentials of the original metric system such as a relationship between volume and length a relationship between mass and volume a universal standard for length and decimal multiplication and division to achieve more units more than a hundred years later france's national assembly used some of these ideas to create their new decimal based system of measurement one where every single multiple of 10 creates a new unit this was a big thing and it was sorely needed if you went to an early european marketplace it was this confusing mix of measures and standards and weights that was just designed to make you want to drill a hole in your head like they all had different units of measurement like milk had its own unit of measurement wine had a different unit of measurement and they had different units based on where they were in the process like at extraction retail and wholesale they use different units for all those it was almost like every product had its own currency and you had to convert denominations every time you bought something what's the ratio of stanley nichols to shirt bucks the same as the ratio of unicorns and leprechauns by the way this lack of standardization is one of the reasons why napoleon to this very day is thought of as a short guy and why a napoleon complex is a short guy overcompensating for his height because before the metric system the french used a foot as a unit of measurement just like the british did only a french foot or pied i think that's how it's pronounced was actually about an inch longer than the british foot so when the brits heard that napoleon was just over five feet tall they were thinking in british feet but that was actually meant in french feet which would have put him closer or like five foot six in british feet which is still not tall necessarily but around average for the time in fact some estimates have put the number of different units of measurement being used in france before the metric system at around 250 000. so yeah it it needed fixing and france was in a bit of a fixing mood but with the french revolution and the removing of heads from bodies and eating of cake and whatnot she told them to eat cake and they ate some cake france after the revolution was all about remaking society in every way they weren't just deposing a king they were dragging europe kicking and screaming out of the dark ages this was the climax of the enlightenment period a hundred years of science and questioning and rethinking of social norms all being put into action they were thrown off the old ways of kings and fiefdoms it was it was power to the people egalitarianism and democracy and the metric system was part of that standardizing measures meant people at the top couldn't cheat people down at the bottom you know with 250 000 different units of measurement there's a lot of room for shenanigans there plus a revolutionary assad is a as a tangible way to show the public that a new government was in charge so france adopted the magic system in 1795. it was meant to be based on nature impartial universal and everlasting for all times for all peoples and because people are always super swell at adapting to new things everybody accepted it immediately with no pushback whatsoever except no that totally didn't happen people fought at tooth and nail the military had to be called in to enforce it merchants were arrested for not using it even napoleon got tired of fighting it and just gave up after a while you know the merchants have been using these systems for decades they've been handed down from their fathers and grandfathers and so forth they were they were traditions and plus it meant that they had to buy new scales and new equipment and all that it totally messed with local economies it wasn't fully embraced until 1840 it was a four decade transition and even then there were certain parts of the metric system that just never quite caught on like metric time yes there was an attempt to create a metric system of time also known as decimal time because for the same reasons you know time is kind of messy i mean 24 hours in a day what's that about round numbers please so that's what they did from midnight to midnight a day was counted up as 10 hours 10 hours made up of 100 decimal minutes which were made up of 100 decimal seconds so one decimal hour was about the same as two hours and 24 minutes in our current time so five o'clock was considered noon this base 10 thinking extended into weeks which were going to be 10 days long and instead of naming the days after random emperors and gods and stuff they were named with latin prefixes that denoted what point in the week they were so the first day was primiti second day was duode third day was tree dd and so forth at the month level is where the base 10 structure kind of broke down because months are generally arranged around lunar cycles which don't give a damn about your obsessive compulsive system of measurement so there were still 12 months each of exactly 30 days made up of three weeks each which were called decades de sadas anyway they named the months after the seasons and the weather for that time of the year and they started it in september in our gregorian calendar because i don't know why oh and if you're wondering exactly what weekends look like in a 10-day week people were expected to take one day off every 10 days gee i wonder why this didn't take off what is the weekend actually the concept of the weekend weekend wasn't really a thing at the time but the idea of the sabbath a day of rest was now this was supposed to be a totally secular calendar but the idea of keeping a day of rest stuck but maybe that only one day every 10 days thing was alright because you actually got a whole week off any of you math whizzes may have figured out that 12 months of 30 days each only comes out to 360 days so what happened to those other five or six days yeah those are basically added to the end of the calendar year as national holidays they were called the sans colloides sounds cool did i sans colloid at all guys i'm trying and they were named to celebrate the various virtues that they felt were embodied in the revolution with a leap day every four years that celebrated the revolution itself france really gave this a go it was a really important part of this new metric system this new you know reimagining of society but whereas people finally eventually caved on things like the kilogram and the millimeter and whatnot metric time just never quite stuck was it really because people had to work nine days before getting a day off instead of just working six days i'm sure that didn't help they also had to wait a full year before getting five days off in a row and those five days were in the fall too which was when a lot of harvests came in like grapes and stuff so people were going to be spending these days off actually working and then there was the religion problem you know the seven day week is in the bible this is when people go to church this messed with people's very sacred traditions so yeah but really the main reason is that france had trade agreements and shared borders with other countries that used the gregorian calendar which has made everything more confusing and more difficult which is the exact opposite of what the metric system was designed to do it turned out time didn't really need fixing now one of the reasons why the metric system was demonstrably better was because it standardized a system of measurements when there were like all these different types of measurements out there and nobody could agree on it time though had pretty much already been sorted out everybody was on the same page with that one and had been for a while it might not have been pretty but it worked and for that we have pope gregory the 13th to thank the gregorian calendar that bears his name was sort of a refinement on the julian calendar from the roman days they of course took things from the egyptians and the egyptians took things from the babylonians who were the first ones to divide hours and minutes into 60 segments that julian calendar is actually pretty close to what we've got right now 12 months with 30 and 31 days with one short 28 day month with a leap day every four years and this was set up in 46 bce so it's pretty impressive the problem is that the julian calendar is 365.25 days long and the earth takes 365.2422 days to orbit the sun now that's super close but over time that does add up it adds up to about one day every 128 years which by 1577 and vote gregory's time that means the calendar was off by about two weeks so pope greg appointed a commission to correct the problem led by astronomer christopher clavius and physician eloyus lilius it took them five years to come up with the answer why these things always take five years the answer was to just eliminate those two weeks and then they refine the leap year rules so that centennial years not divisible by 400 are excluded for example we had a leap year in 2000 because it was divisible by 400 but we didn't have one in 1900 we won't have one in 2 100. in fact leap year days on centennial years are actually kind of rare i wish i'd known that in 2000 i would have made a bigger deal out of that one but perhaps the biggest change from the julian to the gregorian calendar was they made january 1st the beginning of the year previously it had been on march 25th which is the feast of annunciation so because gregory was the pope and it's good to be the pope the catholic world basically adopted it right away meaning that italy spain and portugal adopted it almost immediately but just like it took a while for everybody to go metric it took a very long time for people to delete two weeks from their lives and go gregorian in fact the british and the american colonies didn't get on board with this until 1752. benjamin franklin commented on the event saying quote it is pleasant for an old man to be able to go to bed on september 2nd and not have to get up until september 14th but by the time the french revolutionaries tried to up in the whole system pretty much the entire western world was on board with the gregorian calendar and the whole thing just seemed unnecessary that has not stopped people from trying to improve on it though there's the international fix calendar proposed by british accountant moses b cotsworth in 1902 it divides the year into 13 months of 28 days each with an additional day tacked on to the end of the year a new month named seoul would fall between june and july all months will begin on a sunday and end on a saturday believe it or not the eastman kodak company used this calendar from 1928 to 1989 because the founder george eastman was apparently a fan then you have the world calendar that elizabeth achilles promoted in 1930 this calendar is divided into four quarters of 91 days each 31 30 and 30 days respectively elite day is added at the end of the second quarter and an additional day called worlds day is also tacked on at the end of the year much more recently in the last decade stephen h hanke and richard khan henry from johns hopkins university came up with the honky henry permanent calendar just like the world calendar it has four quarters of 91 days but their months go 30 30 31 giving a 364 day year and they make up for that with a full week they call extra week every five or six years the main point of this calendar is it's a perennial calendar meaning dates will always fall on the same day of the week for example october 4th would always fall on a wednesday but believe it or not there are some use cases where metric time or decimal time is still used especially in computation unix time counts the number of seconds since january 1st 1970 in place of a date and time microsoft's file name is a 64-bit value that represents the number of 100 nanosecond intervals that have elapsed since january first 1601 coordinating universal time vax vms uses the number of 100 nanoseconds since november 17 1858 and risc os depicts the time in centiseconds since january first 1900. these are all obviously very niche applications but you could maybe consider them the ghost of metric time now there are of course other calendar systems based on different cultures and religions around the world that have also stood the test of time and i think maybe the reason they have stood the test of time is the same reason that metric time didn't really win out over the gregorian calendar it's because time is very personal it's literally our most precious resource it's it's it's something you can never get back once it's gone and that's not something we generally think about in the hustle and bustle of our lives we probably should think about it more but it is there in the measurement of it you know as i record this we're already in march we're closing out the first quarter of 2021 and i'm already doing that thing where it's like oh my god it's already march your birthday your anniversaries your days sober your years in a job all of these things are made tangible by a calendar these specific important dates they're not just arbitrary measurements of time they're they're mile markers on your life's journey and that's no small thing it's hard to just burn that up and start over with something brand new the discussion of time and the calendars that measure it are just a reminder of how precious time is and what a finite amount of it we all have and how we should make the most of it and one good way of spending your time is listening to music and if you want to get the most out of your music you might want to check out today's sponsor raycon earbuds long time viewers have heard me talk about raycon earbuds but yes these are the actual earbuds that i use and they've got the earwax on it to prove it i've got the black ones but they come in a variety of colors and patterns there's a variety of fit options and of course they're wireless so no cords to yank out of the ears which makes them perfect for getting out enjoying a good walk being active and just having a less sucky day and they give you 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 584,643

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Id: kUIYI34CdkE

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/radome9]

The fundamental problem is that the day is not a sound thing to base a modern scientific measurement standard on.

First off, what do you mean by a day? A solar day? That varies by over 40 seconds during the year. A mean solar day? That gets longer by about a millisecond over 43 years. You can't have a scientific constant that gets 0.23% larger over a century. An ephemeris day? That's defined in terms of the second, so that's putting the chart before the horse.

Second off, even if we somehow did manage to create a 10 hour day with 100 minutes to the hour and 100 seconds to the minute, then what?
We'd face the same problem again with the year, because there's no way to divide a year into an even number of days - hence the existence of leap years. What do we mean by 'year' anyway - is it a tropical year or a sidereal year?

Also, he claims that metric time is relegated to "niche applications" like computer time keeping. That's a strange way of looking at it - all precision time keeping is second-based and therefore metric. All our computers, including our phones, measure time in some metric unit, only converting it to years, days, hours, and minutes when it's time to present it to a human. All our precision clocks are just fancy computers. Nearly all our communication is mediated via computers that slice time into units of seconds.

If any time keeping is "niche", it's the paper almanac and the mechanical clock - the only domain where non-metric time still reigns supreme.

[u/gbbgu]

I think the nature of how we represent time (a circle with hands) just lends itself to using 12 way better than 10.

[u/radome9]

We sort of do have metric time. The metric time unit is the second. Unfortunately, the time periods we want to measure (days) aren't divisible into a nice round number of seconds and never will be because they are not constant.

Basing time on the length of an Earth day is like basing distance on the length of a rubber band.