The most relevant paragraph:
Now, using a new way of linking the clocks with ultra-fast lasers, researchers have shown that different kinds of optical atomic clocks can be placed a few kilometres apart and still agree within 1 part in 10¹⁸. This is just as good as previous measurements with pairs of identical clocks a few hundred metres apart, but about a hundred times more precise than achieved before with different clocks or large distances.
At first I was like: The second what?
That’s the problem when your language doesn’t have capitalization for nouns
Can’t wait for decimal time with 100,000 seconds/day /s
Decimal time exists, thanks to the French Revolution.
There are 100 decimal seconds in a decimal minute, 100 minutes in a decimal hour, and 10 hours in a decimal day. Each second is slightly shorter than a SI second.
I know and nobody uses it.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to decimalise time for human use. If you make it useful for humans, it doesn’t sync well to a day. If you make it sync to a day, the resulting units are awkward for the human mind.
Amusingly, for computers, time is decimalised! UTC is a fully metric time. It’s just simpler to constantly remap to and from UTC to a user’s time, than to train the user to use UTC.
For computers, Unix time is in binary. But yes.
However, humans can get used to longer/shorter seconds, minutes and hours. Arguing the opposite is like saying the meter would never work because it doesn’t have a human body relation like feet. The problem is the sheer amount of documents, equipment and SI using the 24/60/60 system, and the indivisibility of 365.24.
The divisibility of 60 is useful, too. It has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 (plus any combination of the above) as factors making dividing time a relatively simple operation.
It’ll likely happen once we move to living mostly in space (if we survive that long ofc)
With a full switch to metric, hopefully. We’ve lost a Mars probe to unit confusion already.
Not everything needs to be base 10.
No but everyone’s life will be easier. Fortunately, most space agency empoloyees are scientists who embrace the metric system because it is less error-prone and does away with arbitrary conversion like in3 / floz. Space civilians will hopefully follow suit.
Metric also has a different unit name for force (N) and mass (kg) as opposed to the ambiguous pound – which works well enough on Earth but not on bodies with different gravity.
Hey! Wait a sec
Could you be more specific?
Would this affect our lives on Earth?
Most likely indirectly, like how GPS has to account for satellites not matching the passage of time on earth due to relatively.
You can now be more accurately late for work. Or your coffee is more accurately taking a long time to come out.
Relativistically.
Wont that fuck up the other measures that use the second as a basis?
