Hours to Shakes (h to shake)
1 hour equals 360,000,000,000 shakes exactly.
How to convert hours to shakes
To convert hours to shakes, multiply the number of hours by 360,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply shakes by 2.777777778×10⁻¹² (rounded).
shakes = hours × 360,000,000,000
Example: 10 hours = 3,600,000,000,000 shakes.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Hour (h)
60 minutes or 3,600 seconds, one twenty-fourth of a mean solar day.
Egyptian astronomers gave us the twelve. Coffin lids from about 2150 BC show the night divided into exactly 12 intervals, tied to the rising of star groups called decans, and the day was later split into 12 hours with sundials. These were seasonal hours, a twelfth of the daylight, so a summer hour was longer than a winter one. The word itself comes from Greek hora, originally any span of time, through Latin and Old French into English in the 13th century.
Equal hours of 1/24 of a day were probably first proposed by Hipparchus, and mechanical clocks made them the practical choice, since a clock showing seasonal hours had to be readjusted every morning and evening. Today the hour is exactly 3,600 seconds and is a non-SI unit accepted for use with the SI. Civil time still bends it a little: UTC hours have lasted 3,601 seconds 27 times since 1972 to keep clocks within 0.9 seconds of the Earth's rotation. In practice we use it for working shifts, travel times and electricity bills measured in kilowatt-hours.
1 hour = 3,600 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Hour; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Shake (shake)
Exactly 10 nanoseconds. Coined at the Manhattan Project for nuclear chain reactions, from the phrase 'two shakes of a lamb's tail'.
Physicists on the wartime Manhattan Project needed a handy name for an interval that kept turning up in their chain-reaction calculations, and they settled on the shake. It is defined as 10 nanoseconds, or 10 to the power of minus 8 second. The name plays on the English idiom about something happening in two shakes of a lamb's tail, meaning very quickly.
One step of a fission chain, in which a neutron causes a fission that releases more neutrons, takes roughly one shake, and a whole reaction is typically over within 50 to 100 shakes, according to Wikipedia. The shake was coined in the same circle and for similar reasons as the barn, a unit of cross-sectional area. It is an informal metric unit rather than an SI unit. A shake equals 10,000 picoseconds, and 100 million shakes make one second.
1 shake = 1×10⁻⁸ seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Shake (unit); Wikipedia: Picosecond
Related conversions
- Shakes to hours (reverse)
- Hours to seconds
- Hours to minutes
- Hours to days
- Hours to weeks
- Hours to months
- Hours to years
- Hours to milliseconds
- Hours to microseconds
- Hours to nanoseconds
- Hours to decades
- Hours to centuries
- Hours to millennia
- Seconds to shakes
- Minutes to shakes
- Days to shakes
- Weeks to shakes
- Months to shakes
- Years to shakes
See all time units.