Thursday, February 9, 2006
Measurement of Time
For any layman the smallest measurement of time is the second. But how do we know what a second is? What is the time measurement for a second. The educated people would immediately say that 1000 milliseconds is 1 second. Then the next question I would ask is how did you measure the millisecond. Again the answer would be that there are 1000 microseconds is 1 millisecond and so on. But this is a recursive question, now what is a microsecond or more precisely how do we measure a microsecond. Ok the next explanation would be that the sundial was the start of the time measurement but even then what was the distance that the shadow moved to figure out the time in 1 second. The next answer would be that a second is 1/86400 of a solar day. Ok, the Egyptians found that 1 hour day is 1/24 of a solar day. But again why this is 24. What is the rationale behind this? Similarly the Babylonians brought in the factor of 60 but again why 60? So effectively, is second some arbid time length that we all agreed (more presicely forced to agree) on this length. I am somehow lost here. Any help anybody?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
On suppose souvent qu'un homme est capable de prendre une décision binaire, choisir entre oui ou non, une fois par seconde. La seconde caractériserait donc l'unité d'information, le bit/sec, appelé aussi parfois le baud.
Un cerveau humain est une machine qui fonctionne à un coup par seconde.
Nous n'avons pas ces problèmes en Europe continentale, car nous sommes habitués au mètre comme unité de longueur et ne comprenons pas que les atlantistes parlent de pieds ou de pouces.
Automatic translation from google :
One often supposes that a man is able to make a binary decision, to choose between yes or not, once a second. The second would thus characterize the unit of information, the bit/sec, called also sometimes the baud. A human brain is a machine which functions with a blow a second. We do not have these problems in continental Europe, because we are accustomed to the meter like unit of length and let us not understand that the Atlantic ones speak about feet or inches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second answers some of your questions, Vivek.
you know what, i've got so hooked to time here that once while reading a 300 page book, i was on the 254th page and was thinking - 'gosh! just 6 more pages to go for the book.'
whatever the reason is, i too was puzzled about this lack of consistency of everything being in terms of powers of 10.
:)
Post a Comment