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There are exactly 86,400 standard seconds (see SI for the current definition of the standard second) in a standard day, but in the French decimal time system there were 100,000 decimal seconds in the day; thus, the decimal second was 13.6% shorter than its standard counterpart.
Many computer systems measure time and date using Unix time, an international standard for digital timekeeping.Unix time is defined as the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 (an arbitrarily chosen time based on the creation of the first Unix system), which has been dubbed the Unix epoch.
Unix time is not a suitable way to represent times prior to 1972 in applications requiring sub-second precision; such applications must, at least, define which form of UT or GMT they use. As of 2009, the possibility of ending the use of leap seconds in civil time is being considered. [12]
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the local mean time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, counted from midnight. At different times in the past, it has been calculated in different ways, including being calculated from noon ; [ 1 ] as a consequence, it cannot be used to specify a particular time unless a context is given.
The commission rejected the seconds-pendulum definition of the metre the following year because the second of time was an arbitrary period equal to 1/86,400 day, rather than a decimal fraction of a natural unit. Instead, the metre would be defined as a decimal fraction of the length of the Paris Meridian between the equator and the North Pole.
Clock time and calendar time have duodecimal or sexagesimal orders of magnitude rather than decimal, e.g., a year is 12 months, and a minute is 60 seconds. The smallest meaningful increment of time is the Planck time―the time light takes to traverse the Planck distance, many decimal orders of magnitude smaller than a second. [1]
Hexadecimal time is the representation of the time of day as a hexadecimal number in the interval [0, 1). The day is divided into 10 16 (16 10 ) hexadecimal hours, each hour into 100 16 (256 10 ) hexadecimal minutes, and each minute into 10 16 (16 10 ) hexadecimal seconds.
For example, the Unix system time 1 000 000 000 seconds since the beginning of the epoch translates into the calendar time 9 September 2001 01:46:40 UT. Library subroutines that handle such conversions may also deal with adjustments for time zones, daylight saving time (DST), leap seconds, and the user's locale settings. Library routines are ...