Why I tell the story of why an hour has 60 minutes

Next month I’m giving a talk on why an hour has 60 minutes. (Thanks @cafesciboston!) This story encompasses the progress of science from before the first writing, exploring contributions from Ancient Sumer, Babylonia, Greece, India, the Golden Age of Islam, and the early days of the Scientific Revolution in Europe. You can find the original article here:

http://www.livescience.com/44964-why-60-minutes-in-an-hour.html

I was told to be ready for questions on how I discovered this story and what drove me to tell it. What follows is a result of that prompt.

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This started with a series of dinner debates with a theologian friend. As a disclaimer on my atheism, let me say: whatever drives you to go out and look at the world, kudos. If it’s wanting to know the mind of God or wanting to understand God’s creation, I can’t criticize whatever motivation you have for driving the wheel of science forward.

I didn't always feel this way, and as a counter to my then opinion that religion makes people unscientific, my friend vehemently argued that the Christian Enlightenment was responsible for the Scientific Revolution in Europe. I was convinced there had to be more to it than this, and I was also sickened by the undercurrent that, when boiled down, amounted to little more than "because our civilization has the right god, we were the ones who got the bomb."

This was when I started researching the history of algebra (something I was curious about anyway). On page 4 of “An Introduction to the History of Algebra” by Jacques Sesiano, it reads:

"Several centuries of continuous [Mesopotamian] observations provided an invaluable body of data for the computation of planetary periods… As it would have been an overwhelming task to convert all these data into the decimal system… the Greeks maintained the sexagesimal system for astronomical measurements… This was also adopted by the Indians as early as antiquity… Then… it reached the Muslims who in turn transmitted this notation to medieval Christian Europe. The sexagesimal division… still used today is thus a living witness to the sexagesimal base once used by the Sumerians… in prehistoric times."

After picking my jaw up off the floor, I started looking at maps and reading about Babylonia, Greece, India, and Arabia. Later I took a course in science writing and decided to use the topic for my final paper.

Setting aside that this story is amazing… it is also incredibly useful! Firstly, because it encompasses the progress of science from before writing up until the Scientific Revolution. Knowing this story, I now have context when thinking about anything else from history.

The second reason concerns representation of ethnic minorities. This is a sensitive topic, so let me start with an image I saw the other day on Facebook.

Link here

Some commenters wanted to know about the quadratic formula. Since the ancient Babylonians, Greeks, Indians, and medieval Muslims all used some progressively advanced version of the quadratic formula, it’s hard to summarize in a list, and is thus not so great for going up on Facebook. Yet, something very dangerous has happened here!

This list goes from the 6^th century BCE Europe to the 17^th century CE Europe. Inadvertently (I hope), this creates the impression that mathematics is from Europe, and thus Europeans are somehow superior or representative of “true civilization.” If you don’t see this as a problem, allow me to point at (with a 10 foot pole) the unfathomable number of YouTube commenters who insist something along the lines of “white people invented science and other races should be thankful.”

An amazing set of circumstances triggered the scientific revolution in Europe, and it’s been fascinating looking to look at scholarly reasons why people think it happened there rather than India, Arabia, or China.

I view Newton as a linchpin for the following flood of applying mathematics to motion and the physical world. His Law of Gravitation has two halves: the terrestrial from Galileo for describing the parabolic motions of projectiles, and the celestial from Kepler and Brahe for describing the elliptical motions of the planets around the sun. Here are my favorite explanations for why these two halves happened in Europe:

The celestial half concerns mechanical clocks. According to David Landes, author of “Revolution in Time”, It gets cold in Europe, which is why Europeans went to the trouble to develop mechanical clocks that didn't rely on water. Clock chimes also set the rhythm of life for medieval Europeans, but this wasn't culturally important to the Chinese. The first mechanical clocks couldn't compete with water clocks in terms of accuracy, but their potential to do so was staggering. Tycho Brahe absolutely needed clocks accurate to within 4 seconds of the Earth's time to take the data upon which Johannes Kepler based his laws of planetary motion.

The terrestrial half concerns Renaissance art. According to Joseph W. Dauben, Professor of History at CUNY, it is because Renaissance artists became obsessed with accurately portraying reality in art that Galileo similarly became obsessed with accurately portraying reality using mathematics. I've not been able to answer if traditions in the medieval art of India, Arabia, or China would have been prohibitive of similarly inspiring great minds from those parts of the world… but it’s an interesting idea.

As a reply to my theologian friend (who has since lost interest in discussing this with me): you’d be correct to argue that Christianity is responsible for the culture of clock chimes and sponsoring great works of art… but this is far cry from the philosophy of the enlightenment being responsible for the scientific revolution.

Nationally, I’m American (US-ian, as my Canadian brother-in-law says), as were my mother and father. Ethnically, I’m half mixed European and half Chinese. While I do occasionally encounter blatant, personal racism, lately I've become more aware of the kind of insidious, subtle racism that comes with inadequately representing people of color. I think one of the best countermeasures to this problem is to tell stories like this. Such narratives eviscerate the idea that “white people invented science,” and they give context for other discoveries throughout history. It is my hope you’ll fall in love with the story too, and tell it to other people.