Decimated 十进制时间的过去……

Tech.view
科技·视点

Decimated
十进制时间的过去……

Jan 15th 2010 | LOS ANGELES
From Economist.com

What if Napoleon hadn’t abolished decimal time?
如果拿破仑当初没有废止十进制时间？

SINCE the start of 2010, your correspondent has amused himself by interpreting the date as a binary number, and then converting that into its decimal equivalent. Expressed internationally as dd.mm.yy, the first day of this year was 010110. In decimal form, that works out to be 24+22+21=22. The game is pointless, of course. But it has made him ponder the whole date and time arrangement people take for granted.

2010年一开始，笔者多了个乐子——把日期转换成一个二进制数，然后再把这个二进制数转换成相应的十进制数。国际通行的日期标注法是“日.月.年”，所以，2010年的第一天就可以表示成010110，转换成十进制就是24+22+21=22。这种游戏当然没什么意义，但是笔者却由此思考起来人们已习以为常的整套日期和时间的表示法。

There are only four years a century when you can play this little game. In the current century, two years (2000 and 2001) have already passed. Like the previous pair, the two that remain (2010 and 2011) contain only three days (1st, 10th and 11th) in three months (January, October and November) that lend themselves to this phoney binary treatment.

每个世纪只有四年可以玩这个小游戏。本世纪已经过去了两年（2000年和2001年）。剩下的这两年和过去这两年一样，每年只有三个月（1月，10月，11月）的三天（1号，10号，11号）可以用这种形式上的二进制方法表示。

Obviously, the smallest binary number in this century’s set was January 1st at the turn of the millennium (010100). The largest will be November 11th next year, when all the bits in the six-digit sequence are present (111111). In decimal terms, that is equal to 25+24+23+22+21+20= 63. There is nothing magical about such a number, though November 11th does happen to be the birthday of a member of your correspondent’s family. For his own amusement, 63 of something will figure in the celebration.

很明显，本世纪最小的二进制数是千禧之交的一月的第一天（010100），最大的将是明年的11月11日，届时这个六位数字的所有数码都会是1（111111）；用十进制表示，就是25+24+23+22+21+20= 63。这样一个数字没什么神奇的，但11月11日却恰巧是笔者一位家人的生日。有趣的是，明年在他庆祝生日之时，他是63岁。

All this playing around with binary numbers has made him wonder why binary time—or, for that matter, decimal time—never caught on in the Western world. Decimal time has been tried on many occasions. Indeed, a decimal calendar based on a ten-month year was used by Romans during the time of Romulus and Remus. Their calendar ran from March to December. The two missing months needed to make up a solar year were dismissed as winter when nothing grew or happened—and therefore not worth worrying about.

通过摆弄这些二进制数，笔者不由引发一个疑问：二进制时间——或者十进制时间——为什么从未在西方世界流行开来。人类迄今为止已多次尝试使用过十进制时间；而且，在罗莫路和勒莫时代，罗马人使用的是每年10个月份的十进制日历——从3月到12月。阳历年缺失的这两个月被作为冬天而舍弃掉，因为在那段期间，万物沉寂，草木不生——所以，这两个月有没有都无所谓。

The ancient Egyptians were far smarter. For three millennia before Christ, they used a 12-month calendar, with each month comprising three ten-day weeks. Five rogue days were tacked on the end of the cycle to complete the solar year. By the time of Augustus, the so-called Alexandrian calendar had even incorporated an additional day for leap years. This was essentially the decimal calendar that the French introduced during the revolution. But the French Republic’s official ten-day week lasted for little more than a dozen years before Napoleon abolished it in 1806.

而古埃及人要更智慧。在公元前的三千年间，他们使用的是12个月份的日历，每个月由3个十天的周组成。在每个太阳年年尾，会用5个机动日来补全。到奥古斯都时期，“亚历山大历”甚至在闰年包含额外的一天。法国在大革命期间弄的“十进制日历”本质上来说就是这种玩意。但是法兰西共和国官方这种10天一周的日历仅仅持续了10多年，就在1806年被拿破仑废止掉了。

Ironically, when the French invented the metric system in 1795, two years after they changed the calendar, they decimalised everything except time. There were base units for length, area, volume, weight and even currency. But seconds and minutes, hours and days, weeks and months were left unscathed.

颇具讽刺意味的是，当法国人在1795年发明了十进制时，也就是他们更改日历的两年后，他们把除时间以外的所有东西都改成了十进制，包括基本度量单位，比如长度、面积、体积、重量，甚至货币。但是秒、分、小时、日、周、月却丝毫未动。

That, along with the failure to decimalise the compass, was perhaps the metrication commission’s biggest setback. Its august president, the noted mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, tried in vain to get the Republic to adopt the déci-jour and centi-jour (a tenth and a hundredth of a day, respectively). But the decimal calendar was deemed enough of a gesture to the new age of rationalism, even though it did not comply with the strict divisions and multiples of ten, and used none of the metric system’s prefixes (milli-, centi-, deci-, deca-, hecto-, kilo-, etc).

这些，再加上指南针十进制化的失败，可能是十进制委员会最大的挫败。该委员会不苟言笑的主席，也就是著名数学家约瑟夫·路易斯·拉格朗日，努力要让法国人接受“十分日”和“百分日”（分别是将每天十等分和一百等分），却徒劳无功。但是十进制日历却被认为足以作为向新时代理性主义的一次敬礼，尽管十进制日历并未遵循严格的十等分和十等倍法，并且没有使用任何一个十进制的前缀（milli-，centi-， deci-，deca-，hecto-，kilo-等）。

Even so, the idea of a centi-jour (14.4 minutes) has cropped up on several occasions since. One reason is that a ten-hour clock, with each hour divided into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute sub-divided into 100 decimal seconds, would make navigation easier—provided, of course, you had a decimal sextant and compass to go with it. Decimal time and longitude would then correlate directly without the need for logarithmic conversion tables. Even the Royal Geographical Society in Victorian England was keen on decimal navigation, and published tables to convert sexagesimal angles and hours into centi-jours and their decimal subdivisions.

尽管如此，从那时起，百分日（每一等分14.4分钟）的概念却已见诸于有些场合。一个原因就是十小时的钟（每小时被分成100个十进制分，每个十进制分被分成100个十进制秒）会让航海变得更简单——当然前提是你要有一个十进制的六分仪和罗盘作为辅助。这样一来，十进制时间就会与经度直接相关联，对数转换表就变得不需要了。在维多利亚时期的英格兰，甚至皇家地理学会都对十进制航海很感兴趣，发行了将六十等分的角和小时转换成百分日及其十等分次级的换算表。

Numerous clocks were made in France and elsewhere during the 19th century with faces showing both the numbers 1-12 for standard time and 1-10 for decimal time. The supposed advantage was that any observer with a decimal chronometer and a view of the sun’s height above the horizon would then know instantly where on the planet he was. With 100 decimal degrees (or “gons” as they became known) to a right-angle, and the distance from the pole to the equator being almost exactly 10,000 kilometres, 1 km along the surface subtends an angle of one centigon (a hundredth of a decimal degree) at the centre of the Earth. Had it come to pass, decimal time and decimal angular measurement might have done for the 19th century what GPS did for the 20th.

在19世纪的法国和世界其它地方做了很多这样的表：表面上既显示表示标准时间的1到12，还显示表示十进制时间的1到10。人们认为这种表的优势在于：任何人只要有这样一块十进制表，再能看到地平线以上太阳的高度，就会立刻知道他在地球上的位置。100个十进制度（更为流行的称法叫作“百分度”）就是一个直角，从极点到赤道的距离几乎就是10000公里；这两点就使得地球表面的一公里的地心夹角恰巧是1centigon （即1百分度的百分之一）。如果当初这些办法流行开来，十进制时间测量方法和十进制角度测量方法之于19世纪可能就会像GPS之于20世纪。

But the French were not the first to think of the ten-hour day, nor even the centi-jour. Like the Egyptians with their decimal calendar, the Chinese used decimal (not to mention duodecimal) time several millennia before Christ. Since the beginning of history, they have divided the day into a 100 equal parts called ke (14.4 minutes), and split each of those into 60 fen (14.4 seconds). When Jesuit missionaries introduced Western clocks to China in the 17th century, the local inhabitants simply changed the number of divisions in a day from 100 to 96, making a ke equal to exactly 15 minutes.

但是并不是法国人第一个想到十小时日的，百分日甚至也不是第一个。和埃及人的十进制日历一样，中国也早在公元前的几千年就使用十进制时间（十二进制时间就更不用说了）。很久很久以前，他们就把每天分成100等分，并且称作“刻（14.4分钟）”，并且把每一个刻成60“分（14.4秒）”。在耶稣会的传教士将西方的钟表引进中国之后，中国的老百姓就直接把每天从100等分改为96等分，这样1刻就正好是15分钟。

To this day, the term ke is used in China to denote “a quarter of a hour”. In Japan, the same character (pronounced either “koku” or “kizamu”) translates roughly into “carving out a small amount of time” and was used, until the Meiji era, to signify “hour”, while the character for fen (pronounced “fûn” in Japanese) is used to this day to denote “minute”.

今天的中国仍然用“刻”来表示“1/4小时”。在日本，同样一个字（音发作“koku”或 “kizamu”），大约可以翻译成“挤出一小点时间”，而且直到明治时期，这个字一直表示“小时”。但是“分”（在日语里发作“fûn”）这个字直到今天仍然表示“分钟”的意思。

Ultimately, the only unit of time that really matters is the second. Originally, the internationally accepted system of units known as SI (Système International d’Unités) defined the second as 1/86,400 of a mean solar day—simply the inverse of the number of seconds in 24 hours. But irregularities in the rotation of the Earth made that unreliable. Thus, in 1967, SI adopted a more precise definition based on the frequency of the radiation a caesium atom emits when it flips between two energy states. No ifs and buts, at absolute zero temperature, this is exactly 9,192,631,770 hertz.

到最后，真正起决定作用的时间单位就是秒了。国际通用的单位制体系SI（国际单位制）规定一秒等于一个平均太阳日的1/86400——简单来说就是24小时所含秒数的倒数。但是地球自转的不规律使得这个数值不可靠。所以，在1967年，SI采用了一个更为精确的制定办法，该办法基于一个铯原子在两个能级之间跃迁时的辐射频率。这个频率不存在“如果和但是”，绝对零度的条件下，9192631770赫兹，不会有任何偏差。

Physicists have no trouble using, on the one hand, picoseconds (trillionths of a second) or even femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second) to discuss time at the atomic scale. They also talk cheerfully of 1018 seconds needed for light to travel from the farthest reaches of the universe. Likewise, in computing, “Unix Time” gives the date and time in terms of the number of seconds since January 1st 1970, and Microsoft’s “Filetime” is recorded as multiples of 100-nanosecond units since January 1st 1601.

在讨论原子级别时间的时候，物理学家用起皮秒（百万兆分之一秒）甚至飞秒（千万亿分之一秒）来都没任何不便。这是一方面。另一方面，这些人也会兴奋地谈论1018秒——这是从宇宙最远处传来的光运行所需的时间。同样，在计算机领域，Unix系统给出的时间“Unix Time”是从1970年1月1日以来经过的秒数，微软的“Filetime”是以100纳秒为单位记录的，开始时间为1601年1月1日。

But computer scientists are just as likely to divide their day into hexadecimal hours, with each hour broken up into hexadecimal minutes. (The 16-base hexadecimal system uses the numbers 0-9 followed by the letters A-F.) The hexadecimal day begins at midnight at .0000. One second after midnight, the time is .0001. Half a day later, noon arrives at .8000. A second before the next midnight is .FFFF. Got it? Your correspondent neither.

但是计算机学家同样也会把一天分成十六进制小时，每一小时又分成十六进制分钟。（十六进制这套系统使用的是数字0到9，后面接着A到F。）十六进制日始于午夜的.0000。一秒钟之后，时间变为.0001。半天过后，来到中午，此时时间为.8000。次日到来的前一秒钟是.FFFF。看懂了吗？笔者我同样没看懂。

In normal life, people have to go to work, arrange schedules, catch planes and trains, and pick up children from school at given times. The number of seconds needed to do such useful things has to be given names everyone recognises and agrees upon. It would be nice if such units of time were decimal multiples of one another. Unfortunately, here on planet Earth, with its decidedly undecimal sidereal year of 365-and-a-quarter days, that is just not going to happen.

在平日生活中，人们必须要在给定的时间上班工作，安排日程，赶飞机火车，去学校接孩子。做这些事情所需的一定量的秒数必须要给出个名字来，而且这些名字必须要人人都认识且达成一致。这样的时间单位上下级之间要都是以十倍进位就好了。但是不巧的是，在地球这个行星星球上，这种事不会发生，因为“恒星年（由365又1/4天所组成）是非十进制的”这一事实是确凿无差的。

译者：eastx
如想与译者本人对该文进行切磋，请到如下链接：http://bbs.ecocn.org/viewthread.php?tid=30359&extra=page%3D1