Why Don't We Have Metric Time? | Answers With Joe

The metric system revolutionized the world and simplified how we measure things. But one part of our lives never quite got the metric treatment - time. The reason why highlights the importance of time on our lives.

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[LittleBallOfPurr]

If we just made years half as long, we could double life expectancy

[dx]

In Europe, Miles Davis is known as Kilometers Davis.

[paulbland]

A funny thing happened on my way to work one day, many years ago.
I worked in a clock making factory, owned by my father. One morning on my way to work, I was listening to the radio in my car, and the topic of metric time was the conversation. I must have come in to the show some time in the conversation. I heard, that we will have 20 hours per day, so many days per month and so on. I was on to this, and as soon as I arrived at work, with this new information ready to blurt out of my mouth in excitement. Dad was having a chat with the other workers, when all of a sudden, I expelled this new found information to the group. Dad, did you hear, that we are converting to metric time. We should jump on this straight away. We need to work out the gearing for the clock movements. Silence took over the room. A glare from my captive audience. Dad looking amused at what had just taken place, and calling me out for being an idiot. Do you know what day it is?
Me, Dumb founded, Monday!
Dad, it the 1st of April! April fools day!
Me, red faced and about the size of a mouse.

[robertsparks]

Some trivia on this topic that you might like: Clockwise is the direction that a shadow moves around a stick stuck upright in the ground in the northern hemisphere. The theoretical circle traced out by the shadow can be easily divided into 12 sections with a compass. But dividing a circle into 5 or ten is not nearly as easy. Cheers.

[robomatt]

“The kilogram is shrinking”
(Pulls out eyelash and sets it on top)
“Fixed it!”

[helanesteinmuller]

My dad was a watchmaker with a wicked sense of humour that belied his shy demeanour. When Australia adopted the metric system in 1974, my father joked with everyone at church that if they came in to his shop that week, he would give them 10% off their new metric watches. He was mortified when at least half the congregation turned up that week (including the pastor).🥴

[jerrylong]

My father had a saying that says a lot about a persons work life.
"Always remember that you are selling what you can't buy, and you don't know how much you have."
I miss you Dad.

[TheBsss]

About the whole Unix time thing you talked about around 15:00. I would say it's niche in the sense that a lot of people don't know about it. But Unix time is used in all of your devices, every single app on your phone. All of it is Unix time.

I'd say it's by far the most commonly used time measurement right now. It's just that it displays it to us in human readable format

[puellanivis]

I was actually working in some software dev work at my university during the year 2000. I actually had to fix a bug in some code, because it had the every 4, except every 100, but not the except every 400. It wasn’t a big code change, and was pretty easy, but it did require me to read and understand all about leap year maths.

[Zorgongola]

Hi Joe, I've been a subscriber with you for while now, it's great to see you mention the Kibble balance mainly because I was part of the team that worked on it from 1991 to 2000 under the guidance of Bryan Kibble. Our main focus for years was in eliminating noise from the experiment, not just acoustic, but also electromagnetic and thermal, the level of precision was incredible. This was at the National Physical Laboratory in England, the same place that Barnes Wallace developed the bouncing bomb during WW2, and where packet switching was invented.
Thank you for including it here.

[Frolkinator]

"If you could not take it as a personal attack"

So, i took that very personally, i feel quite attacked.

[danejohannescaldwell]

One of the challenges of metric time is that it is inconvenient for shift work. You can divide 24 hours evenly into 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, or 12 parts, which works very well if you have 3 shifts (8 hours each) or 4 (6 hours each). Metric time can only be divided into 2 or 5 parts unless you use fractional hours.

[jasongreen]

I love that you called time “mile markers” in a metric video. Well played.

[rafaeldiasdemoura]

“Let’s make a universal system for all people”
*names months after seasons in the northern hemisphere*

[Applemangh]

I always thought it was because 12 is so conveniently divisible, so you can split the time on a clock into a lot of different sized chunks for scheduling, without breaking into individual hours. And when you do have to break apart hours 60 (a multiple of 12) can also be neatly subdivisided based on need.

[martian_yearz]

i appreciate the plug for "days sober", im 2 yrs clean off of heroin. I am currently in college at 30 and majoring in engineering and love your channel just a little bit more now Joe! Knowledge has truly changed my outlook on life and goals for my own. #spacefish

[howdyhamster]

There was the watch company Swatch, which created .beat time in 1998 dividing the day into 1000 beats. There were no time zones, and the day was based on the time in Biel, Switzerland. One of the few applications to implement it was the video game Phantasy Star Online, with in-game clocks and timers being set to it. For example, you could feed your "mag" (robotic pet) every 2 beats, though players usually just said 3 minutes. It also eliminated the need for international groups of players to convert time zones.

[afalcone]

Imagine your birthday always being on mondays in the Hanke-Herny calendar.

[ryanm]

The frustrating thing about time is that it keeps slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future.

[SolarWebsite]

I saw an interview once with the guy at Microsoft who led the team that kept track of the world's time zone's, DST dates, stuff like that, to make sure instances of MS Outlook all around the world agreed upon identical times and dates for a given appointment. I can't find the video anymore (it must have been 10+ years ago) but I remember him describing the nightmare this job essentially was. This team had to browse like Chinese regional newspapers to find out that some province would switch time zone to match a neighbouring province, or discover that Chile is going to change the date at which DST becomes active.

Making mistakes, or missing such changes, meant Outlook users missing appointments. Outlook users not updating their Office software could mean the same. Surely an interesting but frustrating job, and one that will not have changed much.

(if someone can find this video, if it's still up, please let me know! I'd love to rewatch it)