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
What determines what time of day it is was originally when the sun is directly overhead, at noon.
Originally eyeballing it like “Yeah, it’s about noon here now” was good enough. As trains began to connect more distant places faster, and we needed more accurate time tables, we came up with concepts like timezones so that we’d have an agreed-upon time. We now measure time zones by how many hours off they are from Coordinated Universal Time (or UTC, which comes from the French name). UTC is descended from Greenwich Mean Time, which is basically the time according to the sun at the Greenwich Royal Observatory in London.
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