Reposting bc I dun goofed before
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Why would metric time still use the same seconds? Surely it'd be a different unit that was a nice multiple of 10
Thr second is already a metric SI unit. A day happens to be 86.4 kiloseconds. I'm not sure why that is weird.
Redefining the second would be a lot of work for no real benefit.
Hours, days, weeks are not metric, you wouldn't really say kiloday or centiday.
We're looking at this the wrong way. The problem is the number of seconds not dividing neatly into the period of the day. You're right, adjusting the length of a second is impractical, so let's look at our other options here.
The main issue is that the length of a day is not actually constant. Leap second occur (in either direction) which mean that a day is sometimes one second shorter or longer. Timezones and DST also can make a day a whole hour longer or shorter.
Seconds are a unit for physical measurement. They're always the same length. Minutes, days, weeks, months, years, etc are imprecise shortcuts that are convenient for our society but this convenience sometimes comes at the price of being bonkers units from the physics standpoint.