Interesting observations... 1 hour is 41.6 'beats' (Round to 42, the answer to the universe) Unrelated to the article, but apropos to the discussion: Why is

Interesting observations... 1 hour is 41.6 'beats' (Round to 42, the answer to the universe) Unrelated to the article, but apropos to the discussion: Why is a second one second long? (How should one divide a DAY?) This is entirely an informal hypothesis of mine so I'd like to lay it out somewhere and this is as good a place as any. Timekeeping probably started with passive mechanisms, sundials. Very imprecise across the year, and there's a need to divide the time into useful segments. Humans happen to have 4 fingers and 1 thumb per hand, or 10 digits across both hands. However if half of something is considered a given natural sub-division, the only prime factors of 10 are 5 (and 2, which is ignored for this). Yet 12 usefully has prime factors of 2, 2, and 3 which allow for far more combinations. Additionally the five fingers on any given hand can align between the marks on either side of the noon point on the dial. Mechanical clocks can have a face that covers the 12 day and 12 night hours, time reused, and a very imprecise mechanism. Gear ratios of 2 and 3 are probably easy to manufacture. Metal and machine technology improves to the point that another hand can be added to divide the clock. At this point it'd be nice to add a prime factor of 5, and one ratio set to do so might be annoying but isn't too economical to add. Thus the hour can be divided by 2, 2, 3, and 5 for 60 min. Further, for the highest end models with the most precision timekeeping it is possible to make one more set of the same gears and add a third (or 'second' precision) hand. Thus my hypothesis, a rough logical outline of how the number of hours in the day may have been selected, and how that lead to the duration of a second as we know it. I wonder if a more universal size / duration scalar can be selected for SI-2 values if we ever leave Earth and thus have reasonable reason to want numbers that are more convenient to work with than a day being 83400 units long.