T stands for “Time”
Last night I had a dream in which I was explaining how Quartz is used to keep time in watches. I can’t remember how I explained it, but it must have been a very vague explanation since I don’t really understand how Quartz does it. So when I woke up, I did a little research on Quartz watches and found out that Quartz has a special property, where when given an electric charge, will oscillate (vibrate back and forth) 32,768 times per second, and so modern electronics will measure that oscillation and then do a simple calculation, then send out one pulse per second. It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Anyways, I was also thinking about why we measure time in the units we do… I guess it was easy to figure out that we have 365 days per year, but I think it is amazing that we just have to add 1 day every 4 years to keep things in sync. It seems like (and maybe it is that) there would be some fraction of a day, like we’d add a day every four years, but every 100 years, we’d skip that leap day, or add two extra days. Also, how did we decide on 24 hours for a day? Why not 20 hours?
I’m sure these have logical explanations, but I’ll save that for another day. It’s like a little bit of knowledge that I will keep a mystery to myself for a while. 😊 I’ll keep it as something to look forward to!
