These seem to be simple questions, but either you do not pay enough attention to them, or they seem so simple that you quickly forget them, but often you do not know what to answer.
Here are the questions about 24 hours a day, calendar, etc. I remember how in my childhood I wondered why there are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute, and not a hundred. It would be more logical and more convenient. Do you remember why there are 60 minutes in an hour?
Check yourself …
It's all about the legacy left to us from the two great civilizations of antiquity - Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Egyptians based their number on not the number 10, as we do, but 12.
The origin of various systems of counting came from what exactly began to count, took as a basis, different peoples. Someone counted the fingers on both hands and got the decimal number system, someone counted the fingers on one hand and got the number system multiple of five. And someone took as a basis the number of phalanges on four fingers, with the exception of the thumb and got 12
So they divided the time into intervals according to the duodecimal system. Based on their religious beliefs, the subjects of the pharaohs considered day and night to be two different kingdoms of being. There was no concept of day yet, and therefore the day was divided into 12 parts, and the night into 12 parts. That is, at first the duration of these "hours" depended on the duration of the day and night on a specific date, and only on the days of the equinox each of the 24 parts of the day had the same duration.
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The easiest way to divide the time into day and night is the right and left hands, since their alternation is most noticeable. Now, we will divide each time period into equal parts. For this we will use the thumbs of both hands. Let's count them phalanges on free fingers. It turns out 12 on the right hand and 12 on the left, that is, 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of dark, and together - 24 hours, that is, a day.
The Babylonians were reputed to be even more skillful mathematicians, but only their count was no longer based on 12, but on 60. The sixty-fold system survived the great states of Mesopotamia and came in handy to the ancient Greeks. Scientists of antiquity created a system of geographic coordinates based on the number 60. The circle was divided into 360 degrees, each degree into 60 “first small parts” (partes minutae primae), and each “first small” - into another 60 “second small parts” (partes minutae secundae).
Now you know that the word “minute” comes from the Latin word for “small”, and the second from the Latin word for “second”. For centuries, the smallest unit of time was the hour. And only when a clock appeared, with the help of which it was possible to measure smaller gradations of time, minutes and seconds were borrowed from geography and geometry. Together with the number 60 adored by the Babylonians.
Now a little about the mysterious number 12 - the smallest number with the largest number of divisors, the first redundant number, was considered a superperfect number, a symbol of a circle and completeness among ancient peoples, a transition to a new level. Let us recall Russian folk tales. When Ivan chopped off all the heads of the three-headed snake, the six-headed snake flew in, then the nine-headed, and the last, the most terrible, was the twelve-headed snake. The cyclical nature of the number 12 is easy to trace - in a year the Earth makes a full revolution around the Sun (12 months), during the same time the Moon goes around the Earth 12 times.
The ancients noticed this from the stars, the Zodiacal cycle appeared. The complete revolution of the planet Jupiter, the largest in the solar system, around the Sun is 12 years, and this is already the Eastern calendar with its 12 animals. The octave contains 12 keys. A lot more interesting things related to the number 12 can be found if interest arises. For example, of all the variety of geometric shapes, there are only 5 regular polyhedrons, and the main one, according to Plato, was the Dodecahedron (dodecahedron), which personified the Universe. Now let's look at the dial. 12 numbers located in a circle should no longer raise questions. 60 is a multiple of 12, but 100 is not.
If you count 5 times to 12, you get 60! Therefore, on the dial, time intervals equal to 5 minutes are located opposite 12 digits, and in an hour there are 60 minutes. And in each minute there are 60, not 100 seconds for the same reason - the rhythm of time is directly related to the Universe and to the number 12.
That's it …
