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Earth-based: the day is based on the time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its own axis, as observed on a sundial [citation needed]. Units originally derived from this base include the week (seven days), and the fortnight (14 days). Subdivisions of the day include the hour (1/24 of a day), which is further subdivided into minutes and seconds ...
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.
The second (symbol: s) is a unit of time, historically defined as 1 ⁄ 86400 of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds each (24 × 60 × 60 = 86400). The current and formal definition in the International System of Units (SI) is more precise:
1.67 minutes (or 1 minute 40 seconds) 10 3: kilosecond: 1 000: 16.7 minutes (or 16 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 6: megasecond: 1 000 000: 11.6 days (or 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds) 10 9: gigasecond: 1 000 000 000: 31.7 years (or 31 years, 252 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, 40 seconds, assuming that there are 7 leap years in the interval)
In the Chinese calendar, a system is commonly used in which days or years are named by positions in a sequence of ten stems and in another sequence of 12 branches. The same stem and branch repeat every 60 steps through this cycle. Book VIII of Plato's Republic involves an allegory of marriage centered on the number 60 4 = 12 960 000 and its ...
An hour (symbol: h; [1] also abbreviated hr) is a unit of time historically reckoned as 1 ⁄ 24 of a day and defined contemporarily as exactly 3,600 seconds . There are 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. The hour was initially established in the ancient Near East as a variable measure of 1 ⁄ 12 of the night or daytime.
Fractional days are often calculated in UTC or TT, although Julian Dates use pre-1925 astronomical date/time (each date began at noon = ".0") and Microsoft Excel uses the local time zone of the computer. Using fractional days reduces the number of units in time calculations from four (days, hours, minutes, seconds) to just one (days).
This is a list of radioactive nuclides (sometimes also called isotopes), ordered by half-life from shortest to longest, in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Current methods make it difficult to measure half-lives between approximately 10 −19 and 10 −10 seconds. [1]