My wife's son just asked me this question and I'm stumped.

>>8399790
one degrees is equal to 1.001 days

>>8399790
Its actually 365.25 (think about the leap year)

>>8399790
>wife's son

>>8399790
oh also the earths rotation(and most other planetary rotation) are not circles, they are elipses.

360 is an arbitrary number. Angle is about the ratio of radius to circumference.

>>8399790

The number of degrees in a circle is a popular and arbitrary human convention that we made up for ourselves, and that we can and do replace with other numbering systems to represent geometric angles when it is convenient for us, while the number of days in a year is an immutable physical fact that simply happens to be true on this particular planet, an arbitrary number which is an accident of this world and also of the fact that we happened to live and develop on this world, of all places. It is not necessarily true that the one was inspired by the other, although there is apparently some ancient historical evidence to suggest such. Exactly /why/ the ancient world liked degrees is unclear, but some comments can be made.

First, yes, it is true that the revolution of the earth about the sun is a physical fact whose daily progression is approximated by advancing about one degree per day. The physical fact is reasonably (to some poor, but not outrageously poor degree of accuracy) modeled by the geometric ideal of the circle and its degrees. But they are still so far apart from each other that we must hold them (the physical model and the mathematical convention) to be distinct notions, despite the closeness of their numbers, and whatever their historical relationship.

360 is an appealing number in that it is a /highly composite number/, so that for a great many of the first few numbers, it is possible to divide the circle into angles which are represented exactly by nice clean integers. 365 meanwhile has the rather ugly prime factorization of 5*73, and this doesn't even fully account for the non-integral part of the year, leap days (as we model them in daily life) and so on.

360 meanwhile is divisible by every number from 1-12 inclusive except for 7 and 11. A three-digit number is still quite a "tractable" thing, while four digit numbers do start to get a bit harder to manipulate very quickly. Another part of the cognitive appeal of 360.

>>8399790
>mfw no one explained what's actually wrong with this

The number of days in the year has nothing to with the degrees in a circle.

Like >>8399805
said, 360 is an arbitrary way to chop up the angles around a circle. you could also chop it into halves, or quarters, but 360ths is convenient for some reasons.

So the earth moves around the Sun, that's a revolution, and it takes a certain amount of time, but the speed of the earths r o t a t i o n is what determines the number of days within a single revolution around the sun.

>>8399828

>The number of days in the year has nothing to with the degrees in a circle.

I was originally going to scoff in words very much like these, but then I thought about it for a moment, did the babby-checking, and so I succeeded not to stick my foot in my mout as you've done.

Rather, it is more accurate to say that /we are not perfectly clear/ as to the historical relationship between the (immutably true) number of days in a year, which precedes humanity, and the human choice to use degrees in a circle. They /are/ possibly related insofar as the one may have been inspired by the other, and even if this is not the case, it is still true that both items describe very similar geometric phenomena, and so they are nevertheless related in this simple sense, historical continuity or no.

The ancient egyptians had a year of 365 days, with 12 months of 30 days each (immediately suggestive of 360, among other cultures' use of 360), plus five days of "extra time" which did not belong to any one particular month.

>>8399846

Lay off the weed for a while.

>>8399790
The length of a year doesn't depend on the length of a day. I think some ancient culture approximated a year as 360 days, which is the basis for degrees in a circle.

>>8399850
This wasn't me >>8399828, and, ironically I'm ripped AF, which is the only reason I'm on /sci/ to begin with.

That aside,
>>8399846

>scoff
I never implied this attitude because I'm not an asshole, I was just trying to answer this guy's (kid's) question,

>I succeeded not to stick my foot in my mout as you've done.
What makes you feel like you need to compete with invisible people on the internet? Can you see my foot in my mouth right now?
What I said was completely accurate within the scope of the question. You've added some interesting information, which is nice, but you don't need to be shitty

>What I said was completely accurate within the scope of the question.

No, it wasn't. That was the point of my reply.

The OP chooses a lazy image and has a lazy writing style, but he actually manages to raise a historically interesting question once you probe it a bit. It would be easy to dismiss for the above "tone" reasons (I almost made this goof) or otherwise by suspecting a troll, but in fact there is an ancient historical suggestion (if not proof) of a connection between degrees and days, as I've started to scratch at.

4chan is composed of males who in between pissing matches and trolling each other, actually do have an above-average understanding of argumentation and rhetoric. And they (we) naturally compete with one another, to some extent, exactly because they are men. Even when they (we) are friendless legbeards, the drive to compete still exists, even if on some latent level. If you think that a civil and substantive >>8399846 (if slightly cheeky) takedown is "being shitty" (much less the other discourses on the site), then you are on the wrong website.

Neutral statement: it occurs to me based on your rhetoric and writing style that you may be female.

>these many replies to such a poor bait

sage goes in all fields lads

>>8399790
365 days is the time for the earth to circle around the sun. Why is it that way? I have no idea why the original scientists/physicists made it that way.

>>8401162

That the OP may indeed have intended the post as bait does not alter that the connection has a certain historical possibility, or credence. It is your error to dismiss it totally.

If anything, we may be charitable to the idea of the OP as a troll, and observe that he "mixes lies with the truth in an effort to deceive us", a tactic of advanced trollery. But the elements of truth persist: 365 is roughly the same as 360, and the angles of the one (the physical reality to be modeled) are roughly the angles of the other (the historical mathematical convention, whose original motivations are not perfectly clear, but obviously geometrically close to the above).

>>8399790
>If a circle has exactly 360 degrees
There is no "if", it has BY DEFINITION 360° fgt pls

>>8401182
The use of 360 degrees has its roots in Babylonian mathematics, which was base 60.