have you ever wonder "what makes a second...a second?", wayyyy off topic Options

[lubu]

I was driving home one day in my belove celica....a question popped up in my head "what makes a second, a second"??...i know there are atomic clocks that miss a second in like 1 million year but how did we even measure a second in the first place...?

Now, a day consists of 24 hours and 1hr=3600 seconds. But we could have had 12 hours in a day and keep the same duration of a second so the number of seconds would still be 3600..it just takes twice as long to move a second to a second...so how and what instument were used to measure a second??

Imagine a second's duration were 10 times faster than today than one would says "yez..my celica can do 0-60mph in abt 60 seconds.." LOL ...yep thats a minute.

[lubu]

g
go take a college level physics 2 class and you will learn

yea i took advanced physics in my engineering course..hehehe but nothing abt this sort of thing. So its the pendulum swing that was used to defined a second..um quite interesting. I thought it was only used to measure the earth's weight...no wonder why we still see the grandfather clock with those pendulums.

dude learn how to quote people
pendulum swing has nothing to do with defining a "second" it has to do with the atoms of cesium..

pendulum can be different then a "second" just think metronome

i guess i didnt make it clear. my question should be what instrument were FIRST used to measure a second. From what i read on wiki "The seconds pendulum was proposed as a unit of length as early as 1660 by the Royal Society of London. The duration of a beat or half period (one swing, not back and forth) of a pendulum one metre in length on the earth's surface is approximately one second.[2]
"

This post has been edited by lubu: Jul 16, 2007 - 11:23 PM