Let’s get one thing out of the way before we go any further: time is an absolute mess. Some physicists aren’t even sure it’s real; Einstein theorized – and it was later proved – that time (and space) distort with gravity and velocity; Douglas Adams proposed it was actually entirely bent. For crying out loud, we don’t even measure it in Base 10! (Thanks, ancient Babylon.) Except that actually we do sometimes measure it in Base 10 because of science and computing. To give an extreme example of the difficulty of measuring time accurately in computer systems: the GPS (Global Positioning System) actually corrects for relativistic effects – a GPS satellite’s internal clocks are tuned to be slightly slower on Earth so that when they’re traveling at speed (Special Relativity), and in orbit (slightly weaker gravitational field, so General Relativity), they run at exactly the same speed relative to their counterparts on the ground. Without these corrections the GPS system would be less accurate.