The Clock's Secret History: Why 60? Why 24?
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The Clock's Secret History: Why 60? Why 24?
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About this listen
🕰️ Why 60? Why 24? The Clock’s Secret History (Intriguing Summary)
Ever wonder why there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day? That quirky math isn’t random—it’s a time-traveling inheritance from ancient minds.
This captivating journey whisks you from the sun-watching Egyptians, who split day and night into tidy sets of 12, to the math-savvy Babylonians, whose love for the number 60 reshaped how we divide time. The Greeks polished the system, the Romans spread it, and medieval monks gave it a spiritual tick-tock rhythm.
Fast forward to Renaissance breakthroughs, pendulum clocks, and the birth of GMT—and you get the globally synchronized time we live by today. Along the way, cultures from China to India to the Islamic world marked time in beautifully diverse ways, all feeding into the clock you check 100 times a day.
So next time you glance at the time, remember: behind those blinking numbers is a 4,000-year story of stargazers, scientists, and civilizations who turned the sky into a schedule.