Reposting bc I dun goofed before
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Thr second is already a metric SI unit. A day happens to be 86.4 kiloseconds. I'm not sure why that is weird.
Redefining the second would be a lot of work for no real benefit.
Hours, days, weeks are not metric, you wouldn't really say kiloday or centiday.
There was an attempt originally, 100 seconds a minute, 100 minutes an hour and 10 hours a day, but it never stuck
French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds (100000 decimal seconds per day)
We're looking at this the wrong way. The problem is the number of seconds not dividing neatly into the period of the day. You're right, adjusting the length of a second is impractical, so let's look at our other options here.
The main issue is that the length of a day is not actually constant. Leap second occur (in either direction) which mean that a day is sometimes one second shorter or longer. Timezones and DST also can make a day a whole hour longer or shorter.
Seconds are a unit for physical measurement. They're always the same length. Minutes, days, weeks, months, years, etc are imprecise shortcuts that are convenient for our society but this convenience sometimes comes at the price of being bonkers units from the physics standpoint.
Oh, so you are saying that overhauling a system that has been used for millennia in favor of one that is a bit more logical for niche cases isn't worth it on large scales?
Saying that the metric system is a bit more logical than imperial units for niche cases is like saying that LeBron James is slightly better than my 70yo mom at very specific aspects of basketball 🙄