Since this is I’m gonna explain my question the same way.
Imagine there is a time-hating wizard who magically removes all time-keeping instruments like atomic clocks, phones and watches, so there is no way of knowing the time right now. If then we were asked to ‘bring back’ the old time that we used (e.g. so that we start again measuring 12:00 in London exactly when it was 12:00 in London before the wizard) could this be done? Is there something physical constant (like kg or meter) that determines what time of day it is? Or, did someone just say “we start measuring time from now, and I say that it is exactly 14:32…”?
Also, if there is this constant that allows us to know exactly when a certain time is, doesn’t that mean we don’t need atomic clocks and can just compare ourselves to this constant? Idk what this would be but perhaps when the sun is absolutely highest in the sky somewhere?
In: 40
nope, that aspect is all relative.
we can measure the seasons just fine, so the calendar could be the same. but it might be out by six months if this time Wizard makes the southern hemisphere dominant. we’d still have noon and midnight in each specific location and probably allocate a local time for that. it means a lot to say “i was up until 3am last night”, but only if you have local times. if we all use the same timezone, i now also need to know your location and then use math to work out if that’s a sensible bedtime or not.
we couldn’t recreate the month names now, so they’d be different, and probably just numbers.
there’s nothing special about utc, it was just agreed before America became dominant. the dateline being largely in the ocean is useful, although we could maybe fine tune that so it’s not half covering an island. that said there’s 2 main ways to cut the land masses to fit onto a 2d map: America on the left or Europe on the left. it doesn’t really make sense on paper otherwise, so it’s unlikely that a central time zone that was internationally agreed would go through America. maybe europe would keep the utc noon line, probably not London tho, although i might try to put it just to the east of Africa. eastern Australia might get it if we draw Europe on the left of the map.
that said, America might just start using a standard that goes through Washington dc and the rest of the world might follow. that might happen anyway.
so could we recreate utc? not really. the calendar? kind of. month names? no. 24 hours in a day? I’d say unlikely: we tend towards metric now and would probably have 10 or 100 main units in a day. but it’s possible, since 12 is actually a useful number to divide and having two halves to the day does make some sense. i doubt we’d have 12 hour repeating clocks tho, that’s just weird. am and pm … what?
we’d still have/recreate the same lattitude and longitude lines, and timezones would broadly follow longitude, as now.
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