Niki TonskyMar 25
Real talk. If circle is 360 degrees, why is Earth taking 365 days to revolve? Where are extra 5 coming from?
Show threadnoncommutativegeometry
@nikitonsky I am not an expert, but it might be a combination of the fact that counting in groups of 60s was a thing (time is still counted like that for example; it has a lot of divisors, which is convenient) _and_ that the year is somehow very close to that 🤷‍♂️
In particular, you wouldn't want the angle to be 365°, because you lose most nice divisors! Actually, for any number between 361 and 365, either the half circle or a third of a turn are not expressible with integer values 🤔
Mar 25 at 3:50pmMastodon for Android
Show threadnoncommutativegeometryMar 25
@nikitonsky I guess what I want to say is really that the process potentially went the other way around. First people noticed that the earth revolves around the sun in ~365 days. Then they wanted to encode this number in a unit of measurement. But the unit should be convenient, which imposes nice divisibility conditions on the number for a whole turn. The closest number to 365 which is divisible by 2,3 and 5 is 360. This might explain it. It might also be completely wrong