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My guess is that it's because you can divide sexagesimal time units into more useful fractions. That, in turn, might have simplified geartrain design in early
by CamperBob 17y ago
My guess is that it's because you can divide sexagesimal time units into more useful fractions. That, in turn, might have simplified geartrain design in early timepieces.
100 = 2x2x5x5, while 60 = 2x2x5x3. A 100-minute hour would be divisible into twentieths, tenths, fifths, quarters, and halves, while a 60-minute hour would additionally be divisible by thirds, twelfths, and fifteenths.
Other than that, I got nothing. Somebody on time-nuts would likely know.
- pavlov 17y agoThe sexagesimal system for times and angles was already in use in Mesopotamia circa 2000 BC. It's probably even older than that because it's so widespread and well-established in Eurasian cultures.
- jacobolus 17y agoThe "useful fraction" reason is the same reason that all the units for every kind of measurement used to be based on 12s, 24s, 60s, and 360s: angle, length, volume, weight, time, etc. And not just in ancient times. It's much nicer to do graphic design on paper broken into whole numbers of inches, with those inches broken up in to 6 picas of 12 points each, than it is to design for A4 (or A3 etc.) paper, made of √2-multiples of base-10 metric units. It's much nicer (day-to-day) to describe triangles in terms of easy whole-number angles, instead of radians (now that we have more sophisticated math radians are great), and base-10 angles would be awful. It's much nicer to count off days of 12 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds than any base-10 alternative. Etc. I think this article posted is completely missing the point. 12 wasn’t chosen because it could be made with a human hand; the particular way of counting on one hand was chosen because it matched the base-12/60 number system.