The Origin of a Second It is worth looking at ancient systems of looking at time because that
is where the origins of our current systems began. Indeed our system came from the ancient
Sumerians and Babylonians. They divided the day into 12 units where the day is given by the
rising and setting of the Sun, which in turn is given by the period of the rotation of the Earth.
Thus the day was given by the period from the rising of the Sun to its setting, which was divided
into 12 units which we call, today, hours. Thus the day from sunrise to sunrise, or sunset to
sunset, is 24 hours. Why they chose 12 units could come from the fact that 12 is the smallest
abundant number, which means it has a lot of divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6. Abundant means their sum
is greater than 12 itself: 1+2+3+4+6=16. We know for certain they chose 12 because there are
three sections on each finger, so with 4 such fingers your can touch each such section with your
thumb to count to twelve. The Babylonians got base 60 from the Sumerians and further divided
each hour into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds. Why base 60 was chosen is that it
has a lot of divisors as well, including the first 6 integers. It is the smallest number that does
this.
We see dividing the day into 24 hours and dividing that further with base 60 lead to the duration
of a second we have today. Only on planet Earth would we have the primitive, ancient origins of
our mathematics in the end line up with modern physics in that, as it would turn out, it gave us
our basis unit of a second to be a natural constant. Though we could guess that on other planets
the ancient civilizations when first inventing mathematics and astronomy, would use base 60
because it is so convenient for doing math being evenly divisible by the first 6 integers. However,
we did that and combined it with divisions of 24 units. Not necessarily would any planet do that.
However, we had other reasons to do that; the Moon orbits the Earth close to 12 times in the
time it takes the Earth to go once around the the Sun. However, there is an ancient system
where the people didn’t divide the day into 24 units, but rather into 60 units, meaning that their
hour was 24 minutes long. That is and
. This was the Vedic time-keeping system in ancient
India. Leave it to the Hindu Indians to have extraterrestrial intelligence in their ancient
beginnings. So let’s go into this. We will see that base 60 combined with 24 describes the
angular momentum of the Earth. That means it doesn’t just include the rotation period of the
Earth, but the size of the Earth (its radius) and the mass of the Earth.
Indeed if the dynamics of the factors the ancients gave us to create the duration of a second are
connected to the dynamics of stars systems then the second should define the rotational angular
momentum of the Earth since we divide the rotation period of the Earth into these factors to get
the unit of second, and should be connected to our Planck constant for the solar system which is
in units of angular momentum as well, as is Planck’s constant for the atom.
The angular momentum of the Earth with respect to the Sun is 2.66E40 kg m2/s. The rotational
angular momentum is 7.05E33 kg m2/s. In orbit angular momentum is given by
For a uniform rotational sphere it is given by
We found our solar system Planck constant was
This gives