“I find you all guilty of wasting time”
That
was a quote from Spy Kids 4: “All the Time in the World” and to be
honest with you, it went straight over my head the first three times I watched
the movie. Then, a week ago I spent one of my study breaks watching a portion
of the film with my sister. After hearing this quote I immediately started
pondering the concept of time. I wondered who decided that there would be 60
seconds in a minute and seven days in a week. And, why couldn’t they have
chosen there to be four hundred seconds in a minute and eleven days in a week?
The
people who chose the amount of days in a week and amount of seconds in a minute
were the Babylonians. Whilst, they used the cycles of the moon to create a
calendar it was because they liked the number seven that there are seven days
in a week (there are seven heavenly bodies: the sun, moon, Venus, Mars,
Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn and thus the number seven was significant to them).
But, what would have happened if the
number eleven was significant to them for some or other reason?
Well,
then there would have been eleven days in a week and this, believe it or not, would
affect our lives in one way or another. For instance, if this was the case we
would probably go to school or work at least seven of the eleven days. Imagine
working for seven days in a row! I would be really tired and grumpy when the
weekend finally came around and I probably wouldn’t be the only one. However,
if there were only three days in a week we would have an entirely different
problem. It would be much harder for us to be productive and continue with
tasks if we only went to work for two days and then had a day off.
The
reason we use the system wherein sixty seconds is equal to one minute and sixty
minutes is equal to one hour is because of the Ancient Sumerians (and later the
Babylonians). Whilst we use the decimal system these people used a system where
the base was either twelve (duodecimal) or sixty (sexigesimal). They knew that
it took approximately twenty-four hours for the moon to orbit the earth and so
they broke this time down into twenty-four sets of sixty minutes (because they
normally used the sexigesimal system when counting) and so because there was
sixty seconds in one minute there would be 60x60x24= 86400 seconds in one day.
And,
five thousand years later we still use exactly the same system.
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| From: http://mombizcoach.com/time-focus-money#.VGm68vmUc1Y |
I
hope you found this as interesting as I did J and if you didn’t I
apologise for wasting a few minutes of your time – did you see what I did
there? *wriggles eyebrows*
Bibliography:
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