Comment by tdiff
1 year ago
Regarding "Catholic meter": its definition depends on time measurement. How did they ensure that "seconds" of different clocks were equal?
1 year ago
Regarding "Catholic meter": its definition depends on time measurement. How did they ensure that "seconds" of different clocks were equal?
The traditional definition of the second before modern timekeeping was 1/86400 of a day. I’m guessing that was precise enough for their purposes.
It must have been brutal to create the first clocks when your smallest external reference is a day long. You first make a huge hour glass or clepsydra and tweak it once per day until it's perfect. Very slow debugging loop.
Well, defining seconds via "caesium frequency" is perhaps more brutal.