00:00Have you always wondered, why are there 60 minutes in an hour?
00:03I mean, who decided to chop up time like this?
00:06Why not 100? Or 50?
00:08Or hey, 8 slices worked out great for pizza, so why not clocks?
00:12Well, for the answer, we look back about 4,000 years to the ancient Babylonians
00:17who had a serious crush on the number 60.
00:21Numerically speaking, 60 is a mathematical overachiever,
00:25divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30,
00:29making it the Swiss army knife of numbers.
00:33Need to split something evenly? 60 just shrugs and says,
00:37Meh, I got this.
00:38So Babylonians loved the math.
00:40Then centuries later, astronomers borrowed their system,
00:44then ancient Greek scientists, then medieval scholars.
00:47Eventually clocks showed up and basically said,
00:50Yeah, I guess we're doing 60 now too.
00:53Always wondered. Stream it now, wherever you get your podcasts.
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