Seconds to Centuries (s to c)
1 second equals 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁰ centuries (rounded).
How to convert seconds to centuries
To convert seconds to centuries, multiply the number of seconds by 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁰. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply centuries by 3,155,695,200.
centuries = seconds × 3.168873851×10⁻¹⁰
Example: 10 seconds = 3.168873851×10⁻⁹ centuries.
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
Second (s)
The SI base unit of time, defined by the radiation frequency of the cesium-133 atom: 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.
Our word second is a leftover of Latin. Medieval scholars divided a degree, and later the hour, into 60 parts called pars minuta prima, the first small part, and divided those again into pars minuta secunda, the second small part. NIST traces the roots further back: Babylonian and Greek astronomers split the circle into 360 degrees, and around 150 C.E. Ptolemy split each degree into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. Clocks that could show seconds appeared only in the later 16th century, and Christiaan Huygens's pendulum clock of 1656 was the first able to keep time accurately to the second.
For most of history the second was a fraction of a day, and in 1956 it was redefined as a fraction of the tropical year, a definition the SI took over in 1960. In 1967 the 13th CGPM switched to atoms: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation tied to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133. The 2019 SI revision restated this by fixing the caesium frequency at 9,192,631,770 hertz. NIST reports that commercial caesium clocks stay within about a three-millionth of a second per year, and experimental clocks based on other atoms are roughly ten thousand times more precise.
The second is the reference unit for time on this site.
Sources: NIST: the second and the SI redefinition; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; Wikipedia: Second
Century (c)
One hundred years.
From Latin centum, a hundred, century has meant a hundred of many things. For time it became popular as a way to speak about a span longer than a lifetime can easily contain, and some languages organise history around it: Italian uses terms like Quattrocento for the 15th century, and Swedish writes 1900-talet for the years 1900 to 1999. Whether such a century starts at year 00 or year 01 is an old argument.
A century is 100 years, which here means 100 average Gregorian years. The strict view counts from year 1, because the AD calendar has no year zero, so the 1st century AD ran from AD 1 to AD 100 and the 21st century covers 2001 to 2100. The popular view groups years by their hundreds digit, making the 20th century 1900 to 1999. The Gregorian calendar itself treats century years specially, since 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years while 1600 and 2000 were.
1 century = 3,155,695,200 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Century; Wikipedia: Gregorian calendar
Related conversions
- Centuries to seconds (reverse)
- Seconds to minutes
- Seconds to hours
- Seconds to days
- Seconds to weeks
- Seconds to months
- Seconds to years
- Seconds to milliseconds
- Seconds to microseconds
- Seconds to nanoseconds
- Seconds to decades
- Seconds to millennia
- Seconds to picoseconds
- Minutes to centuries
- Hours to centuries
- Days to centuries
- Weeks to centuries
- Months to centuries
- Years to centuries
- Milliseconds to centuries
- Microseconds to centuries
- Nanoseconds to centuries
- Decades to centuries
- Millennia to centuries
See all time units.