At 11:37 AM 6/27/99 -0700, John Cowan wrote:
>But why muck around with planetary engineering at all? Why not
>kilosecs, megasecs, gigasecs? These are the units used in Joan Vinge's
>sf novel _The Outcasts of Heaven [Asteroid] Belt_, and they work well.
I was going to stay out of this, but it's deja vu all over again for me--as
I pointed out in a letter to American Scientist back in the 1970s, time as
duration is in fact best measured with the SI second, as John has
suggested, but the 24-hour day (12x2 for us Yanks), as well as the
365.2something-day year, is time-as-position, in the same sense that metres
measure distance, but degrees measure position on the surface of the earth.
SI would suggest that we measure longitude and latitude in radians, but
it's still not meters. If I were walking about on the surface of a planet
other than Earth, I might be vitally interested in my "temporal position"
relative to sunrise and sunset, regardless of how many seconds one rotation
took.
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Curtis Clark http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
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