#coordinated universal time

Yes of course! Thanks for asking! I tried to be as in-depth as possible but if there is anything you still don't understand feel free to ask, I will then try to find a way to explain it more clearly (maybe visualize it if that would help).

Disclaimer: I am not an expert or activist in this field. This is simply something I find personally interesting and this is just my personal opinion. I'm not trying to forcibly change something or make someone think a certain way. (You might laugh now but you'd be surprised at how angry people have gotten at me for this before).

So just to clear up some basics: Time zones are artificially drawn zones (based vaguely on the Earth's longitutes) that were originally invented during the rise of the railroad in the US to help with the train schedules and were quickly adapted across the globe with the rise of globalisation and capitalism because they necessitated more standards for time measuring.

These are our current time zones:

As you can see, most of them don't go straight down following the longitudes. They're adjusted (often crossing over other longitudes) to contain for example whole countries or states within one time zone.

You should be pretty clear on all this to understand my position.

Argument number 1 for why time zones suck, maybe the weakest one: Time zones are confusing. Scheduling global online events often results in confusion, flights across time zones leave people confused about the flight time or time of arrival, crossing time zones unknowingly can cause confusion... I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that everyone has had at least one moment in their life where time zones left them confused. So right off the bat, not a super system for such a globalised world. But I understand it might not be enough to convince you that they're not the best system out there.

Argument number 2: Time zones are, unfortunately, a source of political tensions. One fairly well-known example is Xinjiang time, a time zone followed mostly by the Uyghur people in China, but not without issues. Conflicts like this have been around for as long as time zones have existed and that is such a stupid and unnecessary thing to cause such problems.

Argument number 3, my main one: As mentioned before, time zones rarely just follow the longitude straight down. This is good for political and organisational reasons, but bad for humans. Because as much as we like to deny it, we are just animals, and like most animals we have a circadian rhythm. Simplified, our circadian rhythm is dictated by the motion of the sun across the sky. If left to their own, natural devices, our bodies like to wake up around sunrise and get sleepy a little while after sunset. Simplified. But that's logical, you probably think "Obviously" because yeah, duh.

The problem is, time zones do not follow solar time. But our bodies want us to.

This is a map that shows you how far off places across the globe are from following solar time. Meaning, how many hours difference is there between noon solar time and noon in their time zone. (check the creators blog for an explanation of the map)

Most places don't follow solar time. Shockingly many are hours off. This means that most people don't (and can't) follow their local solar time according to their circadian rhythm, which results in numerous health problems that are associated with insomnia and sleep deprivation like a higher risk of heart attacks for example (Note, this is still being researched so this isn't a "100% yes, these health issues definitely arise because of this" thing, this is a "things seem to point toward this connection but there's unfortunately many factors that play into health so this is hard" thing). And I think a lot of people can attest to the fact that bad sleeping habits can have horrible effects on mental health. And boy do time zones cause bad sleeping habits.

This is where a lot of people get real angry at me: What is my personal idea of a better system? (I'm not saying this is definitely the best, just my personal favourite)

One universal time + local solar time.

How does it work?

Every clock in the world follows a single 24 hour time, a Universal Time. Which means that 5am or 6pm or 3:30pm is always the same everywhere in the world. This time zone is only used for organisational reasons. Schedules, appointments, opening hours... all this is noted in Universal Time. Which means if an event that is hosted in India says "Tomorrow at 4pm" you know exactly when that is because it is also going to be 4pm for you, because all clocks say the same thing.

But this doesn't mean that everyone in the world has to get up and go to bed at the same time, regardless of whether it's day or night for them. The time on the clock is essentially meaningless. It could just as well say "Orange" instead of "One". It's just about having something that everyone knows and understands. In fact, we already do have that in a way. All time zones are based on the Coordinated Universal Time. We know what the time is because our clocks were based on this time, we just added our respective time zone. (A small note I don't wanna get into too much: Military, air traffic, the ISS and more already do follow UTC because it avoids confusion and is always the same for everyone no matter where they are.)

And how does the solar time play into this? The solar time is for you, your neighbourgood, your town or city. With time zones abolished, people are free(er) to follow their local solar time. For example, business are no longer under pressure to open at the same hour that a business 4 hours away (but in the same time zone) opens.

A hopefully helpful example:

Let's say 9am solar time is a comfortable time for a business to open and workers to start working because ideally, they might get up at 8am solar time for work (let's says that is around sunrise, a perfect time to wake up for our bodies). Right now, with time zones, that business is 3 hours away from the longitude that their time zone is based on, so they're 3 hours away from their local solar time. All businesses in this time zone open at 9am. However it isn't 9am local solar time for this business- it's 6am local solar time. So people have to get up at 5am local solar time, far away from what their natural circadian rhythm would like. That is the reality for plenty of places (as seen on the map). Now if there were no time zones, this business would have no reason to open up at the same time as a business 3 hours away. They could simply look at their local solar time and say "Okay, we open at 9am local solar time, because people get up around sunrise at 8am solar time in this area." So if anyone wants to know when this business will open (or when to start working) they can check the business hours and find a Universal Time. So for this place 9am solar time might be 5:38pm Universal Time. They might round that to 5:30pm Universal Time. And everyone in the world will know when this time is. So people working at this business might set their alarm for 4:30pm Universal time, almost 8am local solar time, just around sunrise.

So you'd only have to know your local solar time if you want to. You would essentially fall into the same rhythm as everyone around you. Think of it like the time before time zones: Time wasn't very standardised, so everyone just eyeballed what time of day it was. And you will always know what the Universal Time means. You will know what 3pm is for you (maybe for you it's the morning) but if you don't wanna, you don't have to know what solar time it would be for you. You'd just know "Oh yes that's the morning" or whatever. The same way that right now you know 6am means morning.

Time zones have only been around for around 150 years. In the grand scheme of human history, this is a joke. We came up with a system that seemed pretty straight forward at the time but through politics and whatnot we've bastardized it to the point where it's bad for us. And if, back then, we all managed, globally, to accept time zones, I think it's not utopian to believe we could, in theory, adjust to something else in the future. Especially something that comes so fundamentally natural to us as following solar time and our circadian rhythm.

Additional reading:

The original Prime Meridian...

In October 1884, 41 delegates from 25 countries met in Washington DC, at the request of the then president of USA, Chester A Arthur, for a conference called the International Meridian Conference, and selected the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory, Greenwich village, in London, as the official Prime Meridian of the world.

Prime meridian, of course, is an imaginary reference line on the earth, from North pole to South pole, denoted as zero degrees longitude.

So, for the past 136 years, the entire world has been broken down into time zones, with reference to Greenwich Mean Time. The Indian Standard Time (IST) is 5:30 hours ahead of the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+5:30), as represented by 82.5 degrees longitude, passing through Mirzapur in Prayagraj district of U.P.

But why was such a conference necessary?

When medieval Europe woke up from the dark ages - they called this Renaissance - it wanted to explore the world. So it put ships on seas and set out to navigate the world. And navigation needed maps. Maps, in turn, needed grids and coordinates. And coordinates needed markers - North, South, East and West.

Marking north-south was easy. The North pole and South Pole were fixed. The midpoint between them was the equator - the zero degree latitide.

But where should zero degrees longitude be? East- West are arbitrary concepts. So, every culture that ever drew maps chose its own “prime meridian” to represent a zero-baseline for longitude. For the Spanish it was Madrid. The Norwegians used Oslo, the Japanese used Kyoto. In total, cartographers have found maps using more than 30 different longitude systems, with prime meridians at cities ranging from Philadelphia to Rio de Janeiro to Warsaw to Giza, Egypt. International maritime travel became messy and confusing.

Also, with the advent of industrial revolution, railways had developed into a prominent mode of land transport. And railways had problems unifying local times for preparing their time tables. For example, in the United States, because of its large land mass, timetables showed 100 different local times, with a span of 3 hours.

So, the International Meridian Conference was called and Greenwich was officially selected as the prime meridian of the world. But why Greenwich? For two reasons.

First, in the 19th century, Great Britain, and hence London, was the power center of the world. They wielded significant influence.

Second, on the other side of the earth, 180 degrees from the prime meridian, falls the International Date Line - a line which represents midnight, when Greenwich is midday - and hence it represents a line where the date changes. So, if it was Monday on one side of the line, on the other side, it will be Tuesday.

If such a date change were to occur in the middle of a country, then it would have led to utter confusion with people not knowing as to which day of their lives they were living. Bang 180 degrees opposite to Greenwich is a vast patch of Pacific Ocean, having just a smattering of islands, with very little population. Hence Greenwich was ideal and suitable.

But the resolution to select Greenwich as the prime meridian was not unanimous. The vote was 22-1 in favor of Greenwich. Dominican Republic voted against. Two countries abstained - Brazil and France. France did not adopt the Greenwich meridian until 1911. Even then it refused to use the name Greenwich, instead using the term Paris Mean Time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds. France finally replaced this phrase with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in 1978.

But why did France do all this drama? Therein lies a mini-tale.

During the 17th-19th centuries, the Anglo-French rivalry was like USA-USSR rivalry during the Cold war or the USA-China rivalry today.

In 1666, Louis XIV, the king of France authorized the building of the Paris Observatory, which is today the oldest observatory in the world.

In 1667, members of the French Academy of Sciences traced the under-construction building's outline and bisected it from north to south. This became the Paris Meridian. French cartographers would use it as their prime meridian for more than 200 years.

So, the Paris Meridian was the prime meridian of the world from 1667 to 1884, around 217 years. Interestingly, Paris has a set of 135 odd bronze medallions, embedded on its pavements, dotting the Paris meridian. These medallions were inscribed with the word ARAGO and North and South labels, in honour of the French astronomer Francois Arago, who defined its exact trajectory in the 19 th century.

Though the Paris meridian ceased to be the prime meridian of the world later, it continued to be in the cultural ethos of the country. The international hospitality and hotel chain Le Meridien was born in Paris. There is a plot point in 2011’s Secret of the Unicorn, a movie based on Herge's Tintin, where Tintin and his friends are looking in vain for pirate treasure at a certain longitude, unaware that the sea-captain who hid it was using Paris-based coordinates, not London-based ones. The Paris meridian was also fictitiously represented as Rose Line by Dan Brown in his novel and movie - Da Vinci Code. There are scores of articles on the internet on Paris meridian, which almost became a prime meridian.

But do you know, which was the prime meridian of the world before that? Ujjain, in India! Therein lies a mega-tale, much beyond the scope of a blog. But here are a few snippets.

According to Indologists D K Hari and Mrs. D K Hemahari, from 1600 CE to a couple of millenia backwards, Ujjain was the prime meridian of the ancient world.

Back then, India was the centre of the world, pretty much how England was a hundred years ago and how US is today. The world was India centric then, on aspects of knowledge, wealth, textiles, metallurgy, spices, indigo, culture, medicine, navigation, trade and many other fields. Due to this dominance, the world’s prime meridian was considered to be passing through Avantika, also called Ujjain.

This has been repeatedly mentioned by many ancient geographers/mathematicians of India and the world. Notable among them are Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Bhaskaracharya among the Indians and Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer, who lived between 87 and 150 CE.

Ptolemy shows the ancient Indian city of Ujjain, in the Greek language as Ozene, in his map and mentions that it is the cardinal city of the then known world.

In the 12th century CE, Bhaskaracharya mentions in his treatise - Laghubhaskareeyam:

Ujjain is a significant location for time keeping as it is situated on the Tropic of Cancer. The Indian name for this Tropic of Cancer is Kataka Rekha. Kataka means Crab, the symbol for the zodiac Cancer, and Rekha meaning line.

Ujjain is also home to the Jyotirlinga - Mahakaaleshwara Temple. Maha = Great. Kaala = Time. Eshwara = Lord of. It is significant that such a temple was constructed there millenia back.

I picked this narrative up from D K Hari and Smt. D K Hemahari's Bharat Gyan book - The Autobiography of India: Brand Bharat: Roots in India. This narrative is lost to us Indians because of the massive brain washing we received from the Britishers and the education system established by them. But I think it is time we know ourselves better.

It would be so much more practical, if it's 18:00 in Beijing it's 18:00 in London.

No need to endlessly calculate each time you comunicate with someone in another time zone you just need to know at what time they're awake.

Each location could choose their working hours in accordance with the circadian rhythm which is more healthy.

No more daylight saving time.

And more, the UTC or Coordinated Universal Time already exists and is used by many like the aviation field and the International Space Station. It would not be that big of an adjustment, for example my 7:00-16:00 workday would be from 12:00 to 21:00 UTC.

Here you can see the current UTC time.

June 29 was the shortest day on record!

Our Earth rotates once in 24 hours. This is how the length of the day is defined. However, the reality is a bit more complex. Because our planet is not quite so constant. Over time, it tends to turn less and less quickly. This usually plays out in milliseconds. But for some years, the Earth seems to want, on the contrary, spinning faster and faster. As a result, June 29, 2022 was the shortest day…

With everyone trying to keep their distance during this pandemic, many physical events and gatherings are moving online. But since the Internet is a global medium, announcing times becomes a challenge.

Even without a pandemic, organizers of online events often announce times based on the time zone in which they live. But this means everyone else, especially in other countries, has to figure out exactly how to convert between their own time zone and the time zone that the organizer uses.

Of course, some people are going to have to do some conversion no matter what, and I guess that would be fine, so long as we could use simple rules like, "Tokyo is 14 hours ahead of New York."

Except we can't just use simple rules like that. Tokyo isn't always 14 hours ahead of New York. Some countries (like the United States) change their clocks and others (like Japan) don't. And the ones that do change their clocks do so on different dates. Combine this with hemispherical differences (clocks tend to be adjusted forward in the summer, but remember that summer in the Northern Hemisphere is winter in the Southern Hemisphere) and you get a giant mess: Sydney is either 8 hours, 9 hours, or 10 hours ahead of Paris, and even I can't be bothered to figure out exactly when each of those is the case.

Even within a country, clock changes can cause confusion. As we head into June I still find people announcing times in "EST" (Eastern Standard Time). Excuse me, do you mean Eastern Daylight Time, or are you from some small town somewhere in the eastern United States (or Canada) that doesn't change its clocks?

People seem to be confused when I approach them about this, so the simplest way I can explain it is this: Eastern Standard Time is not a time zone, and neither is Eastern Daylight Time. They are parts of a time zone, and that time zone is called Eastern Time. In Eastern Time, one part (EST) is used during one half of the year, and the other part (EDT) is used during the other half of the year.

But people in the US all adjust their clocks at the same time, so what does it matter? Because even that's not true: Hawaii and most of Arizona don't adjust their clocks. Imagine someone in Phoenix announces an event at "3 PM Mountain Standard Time" (which is the time that they use year-round) and someone else simply assumes "3 PM Mountain Time." But 3 PM Mountain Time in June is 3 PM Mountain Daylight Time (in most of that region), which would actually be 2 PM Mountain Standard Time. The attendee shows up an hour early.

So what's the solution to all this? Lurking in the background is the idea of a "universal time," a single reference that all other time zones use as a basis for their own times. Originally this was GMT, and now it's UTC. The time in most countries is a certain offset behind or ahead of UTC. For example, Eastern Standard Time is 5 hours behind UTC, often written as "UTC-5". When people adjust their clocks, the offset changes: Eastern Daylight Time is 4 hours behind UTC, or "UTC-4". (UTC itself doesn't have the same sort of adjustments; after all, it's meant to be a consistent reference for everything else.)

New Post has been published on https://www.fitness18.com/why-denmark-is-07-seconds-behind-the-world/