Several proposals for
metric time systems not based on the
second but instead on decimal fractions of an Earth
day have been advanced. Many of these include a unit of 10
-3 day, which is 1.44 minutes.
The most popular unit system was instituted in France during the Revolution as part of the French Revolutionary Calendar:
- 10 metric hours in a day (2 h 24 min each)
- 100 metric minutes in a metric hour (1 min 26.4 sec each)
- 100 metric seconds in a metric minute (0.864 sec each)
- 10 days in a metric week (called a dekade)
One example is Swatch's Internet time, which divides the day into 1000 equal ".beats". Zero .beats, written @0, is equivalent to midnight in Switzerland, Swatch's home country, or 1:00 UTC.
No country has officially adopted metric time. Given the complexity involved in a changeover from the two universal systems currently used in education and higher technologies, and the practical incompatibility between any two systems, a new adoption would require yet a third universal use: There is no evidence that its adoption is ever likely to occur, beyond dual mode clock novelties.
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