You think you know the answer. It’s the kind of thing we learn before we even learn how to tie our shoes. Sixty. There are sixty seconds in a minute. It’s the foundational heartbeat of our entire lives, from the way we soft-boil an egg to the way global stock markets execute high-frequency trades.
But if you’re asking how many seconds are in one minute because you've noticed your computer clock acting weird or you've heard whispers about "leap seconds," you’re actually tapping into one of the most complex debates in modern science. Honestly, for 99.9% of human history, sixty was the only number that mattered. Today? It's complicated.
Time isn't just a number on a digital display. It's a measurement of the Earth's rotation, and the Earth is a bit of a messy timekeeper.
The Babylonian Legacy of the 60-Second Minute
We have the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians to thank for this. Why 60? It seems like an arbitrary choice when we live in a base-10 world. We have ten fingers. We count in tens. Yet, our clocks are stubbornly sexagesimal.
The Babylonians loved the number 60 because it’s incredibly "friendly" for division. You can divide 60 by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. Try doing that with 100. You get messy decimals almost immediately. When you’re an ancient astronomer trying to divide the sky or a circle into equal parts without a calculator, 60 is a magic number.
This stuck.
By the time Eratosthenes and Hipparchus were mapping out the world and the stars, the division of a degree into 60 "minutes" (from partes minutae primae, or first small parts) and then into "seconds" (partes minutae secundae, or second small parts) became the global standard. It’s a legacy that has survived the rise and fall of empires. It’s survived the French Revolution’s attempt to introduce "decimal time," where they tried to make 100-second minutes happen. People hated it. It didn't last.
When a Minute Has 61 Seconds
Here is where it gets weird. Sometimes, a minute actually has 61 seconds.
Since 1972, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has occasionally added a "leap second" to the last minute of June or December. This happens because the Earth is actually slowing down. Tidal friction—caused by the moon pulling on our oceans—acts like a tiny brake on our planet’s rotation.
If we didn't add these seconds, our atomic clocks (which are perfectly consistent) would eventually drift away from solar time (which is based on the Earth's actual spin).
Think about that for a second.
We literally have to pause the world's most precise clocks for one tick to let the Earth catch up. If you look at the history of UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), we’ve added 27 leap seconds since the seventies. That means, technically, 27 different minutes in recent history have had 61 seconds instead of 60.
The Tech Nightmare of the 61st Second
Big Tech hates the leap second. It's a disaster for code.
When Reddit went down for nearly an hour in 2012, it was because of a leap second. The Linux kernels couldn't handle the "duplicate" second, causing CPUs to lock up in a frantic spiral. Cloudflare had a massive outage in 2017 for the same reason. Their software saw a "negative" time duration because the clock stepped back or stalled, and the systems basically panicked.
Google eventually got so tired of the crashes that they invented "Leap Smearing." Instead of adding a whole second at once, they slightly slow down their clocks by a few milliseconds over the course of 24 hours. It’s clever. It’s also a sign of how much we struggle with the fact that how many seconds are in one minute isn't a fixed universal constant.
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Atomic Precision vs. Celestial Reality
We used to define a second as $1/86,400$ of a mean solar day. That was the gold standard. But the sun is unreliable.
In 1967, the world shifted. We stopped looking at the stars to define time and started looking at the atom. Specifically, the Cesium-133 atom. A second is now officially defined as the duration of $9,192,631,770$ periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of that atom.
It’s precise. It’s also totally divorced from the spinning rock we live on.
This creates a tension. On one hand, you have the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) wanting a smooth, continuous timeline for GPS and telecommunications. On the other hand, you have astronomers who want noon to actually be when the sun is at its highest point.
The 2035 Deadline: Changing the Minute Forever
In November 2022, scientists and government representatives from around the world met at the General Conference on Weights and Measures outside Paris. They made a historic decision: they are going to ditch the leap second.
By 2035, the plan is to stop adding these single seconds to the minute.
This doesn't mean the Earth will stop slowing down. It just means we’re going to let the "drift" happen. Instead of fixing it every year or two, we might wait until the difference is a full minute—which could take centuries—and then deal with it.
So, for the next decade, you might still encounter a 61-second minute. But after 2035? The minute will likely stay a strict, unyielding 60 seconds, regardless of what the Earth is doing. We are choosing digital convenience over celestial alignment.
The Physics of a Second
Does a second feel the same everywhere? Not really.
Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that time is relative. If you’re at the top of a mountain, time actually moves a tiny bit faster than it does at sea level. Gravity warps time. This isn't just theoretical physics; it's a practical problem. GPS satellites have to account for this. Their internal clocks are moving faster than ours on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day because they are further away from Earth's gravity.
If they didn't adjust for this, your Google Maps would be off by kilometers within a single day.
Why We Care About the 60th Second
In our daily lives, we use the 60-second minute as a psychological anchor.
- The "Two-Minute Rule": If a task takes less than 120 seconds, do it now.
- The HIIT Workout: 45 seconds of work, 15 seconds of rest.
- The Microwave: Why does 60 seconds feel longer than one minute when you’re staring at the display?
We perceive time subjectively. When you're in a "flow state," seconds disappear. When you're waiting for a web page to load, a single second feels like an eternity. Amazon famously found that every 100ms (one-tenth of a second) of latency cost them 1% in sales. In the world of high-speed internet, a minute isn't just a unit of time; it's a massive window of opportunity.
Beyond the Basics: Unusual Time Units
While we’re talking about how many seconds are in one minute, it’s worth looking at the smaller slices.
Did you know a "jiffy" is an actual unit of time? In electronics, it's often the period of an alternating current cycle (usually $1/50$ or $1/60$ of a second). In physics, a jiffy is even shorter—the time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum.
Then there’s the "micro-century." This was a term popularized by mathematician John von Neumann to describe the maximum length of a lecture. It’s roughly 52 minutes and 36 seconds. It turns out, 60 minutes might actually be longer than the human attention span can handle.
Actionable Steps for Mastering Your Minutes
Knowing that a minute is 60 seconds is basic. Managing those seconds is where the value lies.
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Audit your digital drift.
Most of our devices sync to NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers. However, if you work in an industry that requires extreme precision—like audio engineering or financial trading—ensure your systems are configured to handle leap-smearing or the upcoming 2035 changes.
Use the "Micro-Break" strategy.
Research from groups like the Draugiem Group has suggested that the most productive people work for about 52 minutes and then break for 17. It’s a modern take on the micro-century. By breaking your hour into these specific chunks of seconds, you align better with your brain's natural rhythm.
Calibrate your perception.
Try this: Close your eyes and start a stopwatch. Open them when you think exactly 60 seconds have passed. Most people stop early, around 45-50 seconds. Training your internal clock to accurately perceive the full 60 seconds can actually reduce stress and improve your ability to estimate how long tasks will take.
The 60-second minute is a social construct, a mathematical convenience, and a historical relic. It is also the fundamental unit of our shared reality. Whether it’s 60 seconds or a rare 61, how you use them matters more than how we count them.
Start by timing your next mundane task. You might find that the "one minute" you thought it took was actually three—or that the thirty-second wait you hated was only ten. Data beats intuition every time.