Minutes to Shakes (min to shake)

1 minute equals 6,000,000,000 shakes exactly.

1 minute = 6,000,000,000 shakes

How to convert minutes to shakes

To convert minutes to shakes, multiply the number of minutes by 6,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply shakes by 1.666666667×10⁻¹⁰ (rounded).

shakes = minutes × 6,000,000,000

Example: 10 minutes = 60,000,000,000 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

Minute (min)

Metric (SI)Current unit

60 seconds. Defined as one sixtieth of an hour.

Minute means small, not short. It comes from the Latin pars minuta prima, the first small part, produced when sixty-based division was applied to the hour. Al-Biruni is credited with dividing the hour into minutes, seconds, thirds and fourths around the year 1000, and Roger Bacon used the same scheme in 1267. For everyday life the minute needed hardware: Jost Bürgi is said to have made the first clock with a minute hand, for Tycho Brahe in 1577, and watches got minute hands only after Thomas Tompion's hairspring of 1675 made them accurate enough.

A minute is 60 seconds, exactly 1/60 of an hour, and the BIPM's SI Brochure is the reference for its symbol, min. Civil timekeeping can bend the rule: because of leap seconds, a UTC minute occasionally holds 61 seconds. A negative leap second would produce a 59-second minute, but that has never happened in more than 40 years. People use the minute for cooking, lectures and phone calls, and the same name serves for the arcminute, which is a sixtieth of a degree.

1 minute = 60 seconds (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Minute; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; NIST: the second and the SI redefinition

Shake (shake)

ScientificTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

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

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