Decimal time
Decimal time refers to a number of alternative Base 10 time measuring systems which have been proposed to replace the current system based on the 24-hour day, 60-minute hour, and 60-second minute. The goal of many decimal time advocates is to retire the 24-hour clock and Gregorian calendar before the end of the 21st century.
Decimal time in most cases includes decimal dates, replacing the Gregorian calendar with decimal day counts, which may be ordinal days of the tropical Year 1 - 366, or integer day counts, such as Julian day numbers and Modified Julian day numbers, which count days without regard to months or years.
In the case of integer dates, decimal time may be regarded as fractional days.
For example: MJD 53210, 5 occured on 24 July 200 at 12:00:00 UTC. The value after the decimal seperator is the time in fractional days.
Integer and fractional days are commonly used by astronomers and space agencies.
Serial time counts base time units as integers, without regard to minutes, hours, days, months, or years. A widely-used serial time system is UNIX time, which is the common basis for time calculations on the World Wide Web. UNIX time counts the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.
The premise behind decimal time is a base 10 numbering system, therefore measuring intervals between dates and times is simplified to a single addition or subtraction.
Decimal Time and the Metric System
The official introduction of decimal time occured during the French Revolution, on 24 November 1793, in the form of a French Revolutionary decimal clock, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours of 100 decimal minutes each; The French decimal clock remained in tentative use until the official introduction of the metric system (or Système International d'Unités (SI)) on April 7, 1795.
The metric system did not include a metric unit of time until nearly a century later, when Maxwell and Thomson (through the British Association for the Advancement of Science - BAAS) introduced the CGS (centimeter, gram, second) system in 1874, in order to derive electric and magnetic metric units, following the recommendation of Gauss in 1832.
The Astronomical second (defined as 1/86400 part of a Mean Solar Day) became the SI second with the introduction of the International System of Units at the 11th CGPM in 1960. The SI later redefined the second as the duration of : 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.
Systems of Decimal Time
Several decimal time systems have been proposed since the 19th century, the principal differences being the choice of unit names, terminology, epoch, and format, with the common factor being the division of a Mean Solar Day of 86,400 seconds into decimal sub-units.
Conversion from one decimal time format to any other decimal format requires very little effort.
Metric Time
Metric time is the most strict form of decimal time, where a single base time unit, commonly a decimal derivation of the Mean Solar Day, is used together with metric prefixes, for example: days, decidays, centidays, millidays, microdays.
1/100,000 of a mean solar day has been the most widely suggested base unit for metric time. At 864 milliseconds, the unit is slightly smaller in duration than the SI second.
The principal base units proposed for use with metric time are:
1 Mean Solar Day, 1/1000 day, 1/100,000 day, and 1/1,000,000 day.
Swatch Internet Time
On 23 October 1998, Swiss watchmaking company Swatch introduced a decimally based Internet time, which divided the day into 1,000 Beats counted from 000-999, with 000 being midnight at the Biel meridian (BMT, or UTC +1), in spite of the Greenwich Meridian being the standard International Meridian and the basis of UTC.
Swatch Internet Time also failed to provide units smaller than the Beat (1/1000 day), which equals 86.4 seconds. The Biel meridian at 7° 14' 24"E Longitude - when applied as a Prime Meridian, creates an offset of UTC+ 00:28:57.6 seconds.
However, Swatch aligned BMT to Central European Time (CET, also UTC +1), demonstrating a complete ignorance of astronomical geophysics.
The Pandecimal Metric System
Pandecimal Time
The microday, or 1 millionth of a day (0.0864 seconds), forms the basis of Sekants Time, a base time unit called a Sekant, which is part of a revised Pandecimal metric system proposed in 1990 by European Futurist Dorian Aescher. The word "Sekant" is derived from the Latin word secans, meaning "to cut."
The epoch for Sekants time is midnight UTC on October 4, 1957, which corresponds to the launch date of Sputnik I and the dawn of the space age, or, as it is called in the Sekants system Tempus Spatium.
The first six digits from the left represent Integer Date (MS), with the 6 digits from the right representing time of day (S).
20 April 2004 - 00:00:00 UTC being equal to 017 000 000 000, and 20 April 2004 - 12:00:00 UTC being 017 000 500 000
The Pandecimal metric system also includes a completely revised set of Metric Prefixes, with capital letters representing decimal multiples, and corresponding lower case letters representing decimal sub-multiples, in addition to common suffixes for multiples and submultiples: -ya, and -yo respectively. Therefore Mya is equal to Mega and myo is equal to micro.
The letters: D, C, K, H, E, M, V, G, N, T, U, P, R, X, Y, Z correspond to decimal exponents: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30
The Pandecimal Calendar
A Decimal Calendar is called a Linear, representing the linear measure of integers, which counts days, or millions of sekants (Myasekants - MS)
Each Linear would consist of 10 pages of 10 days each, with each page (1 ten day period) being a Vyasekant (VS), and 10 Vyasekants being 1 Nyasekant.
017 000 000 000 being VS 1700 - day 0 (Zerosday), with the time being 000 KS (Kyasekants), 1 KS = 1000 sekants, or 1/1000 day (86.4 seconds)
The 10 days of the Vyasekant each have names corresponding to their respective numeral: Zerosday, Onesday, Twosday, Threesday, Foursday, Fivesday, Sixesday, Sevensday, Eightsday, and Ninesday.
Standard work days would be Onesday to Threesday, and Fivesday to Eightsday, with offdays: Zerosday, Foursday and Ninesday.
Pandecimal Time Zones
Time zones would be replaced by 10 Geozones, at 36° (dyoturn) intervals, numbered 0 - 9, with a single decimal time worldwide, based on UTC, with daily schedules being offset by Geozone rather than by local Time Zone, each Geozone offset being 100 KS. (144 minutes)
Geozone 0 would be centered on the Prime Meridian 0°, and would cover the entire EU.
The 10 Geozones would advance westward. Therefore the operating times of businesses, and living schedules of persons in cities around the world would be coordinated using these Geozone offsets. Latitude and longitude would perforce be decimalized, using a new metric unit of angular measure, the turn, 1 turn being equal to 360° divided into kyoturns (1/1000 turn, or 21 minutes, 36 seconds of arc) and myoturns (1/millionth turn, or 1296 milliseconds of arc ). The Prime Meridian would remain unchanged at 0°. Tropical Year cycles would be notated on the Linear in the form of Ordinal Solar day numbers 1 - 366 with Solar Day 1 always occuring on the Vernal Equinox. Years however, would not be counted.