Why Time Is Divided the Way It Is: The Curious History Behind Our Clocks and Calendars
I was sitting in a hospital waiting room when the question arrived—uninvited, almost absurd in its simplicity. Why does a minute have 60 seconds? Why not 100? Or 30? Why does time, of all things, resist the neat logic we apply to everything else? The question lingered, not because it was urgent, but because it was unsettling. It exposed a quiet inconsistency in the way we structure the world. We count money in tens. We measure distance in tens. Our systems of weight, volume, and currency all obey the same numerical instinct: the reassuring regularity of base-10. It feels natural, almost inevitable. And yet time—arguably the most fundamental dimension of human experience—refuses to comply. It unfolds according to a different rhythm: 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours. A structure that feels, at first glance, arbitrary. Even irrational. But the more one looks at it, the more that sense of arbitrariness dissolves. In its place emerges something more intricate and more revealing: a layered i...