Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
We just have to move the Earth closer to the Sun, or increase the Sun's mass, or make the days longer.
... or we can forget about the "natural" day/night and season cycles and define days and years in whichever way we want (why 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour, anyway)?
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I think the Sumerians (or some such), in the land that invented writing for administrative/counting purposes (taxes already), and who developed astronomy/astrology, needed to manage big numbers. So the 60 base, with many more factors than 10 (traditional counting on one's fingers), among them 12.
And as recently as the late 18th century, Goethe was lost when visiting northern Italy which counted the hours of daylight (as far as I remember).