I hate admitting this. I’m 46, educated and logical, but I don’t TRULY understand how time zones work – when I flew to America from the UK the flight was 8 hours, but when I landed, only 2 hours had elapsed in local time but it’s the same day. Where does the time go? Does it sort of get saved up at the international date line and cancelled or something? I hate admitting I don’t really understand this.
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As the earth rotates, the sun covers a different part of the earth over time. Time zones basically try to normalize globally where the position of the sun (and thus light/dark should be). Otherwise noon in New York would be quite literally night and day different than noon in Beijing, which makes trade and communication more confusing and complicated.
You’re not actually gaining or losing any time persay – just gaining or losing daylight hours by relocating to a different part of the globe.
I think you might have that backwards.
Let’s say you’re at JFK in NYC. You are 5 hours behind London. So it’s noon in NYC and 5pm in London. If your flight leaves at noon, it takes 8 hours to fly. When you land it would be 1am local time. If you left at noon from London, flew 8 hours, and landed in NYC, it would be 3pm local time, same day.
thats basics of mechanics. no movement can exist without point of reference.
12 am in London is 07 am in NY
you were moving against rotation of Earth, so Earth pulled you and plane to east, if your plane was able to fly with speed of 1000 miles per h, you would arrive at the same local time as you departed in UK
It doesn’t go anywhere… imagine a book and each chapter is a timezone. You normally start you day at chapter 1…but when you go across timezones suddenly you’re at chapter 4. It’s kinda like that except there’s a never ending cycle of the first few pages disappearing, like the minutes of the day.
There’s no time lost or gained. So it sounds like your situation was something like this: you left the UK at 12 noon and landed somewhere in the US, 8 hours later at 2pm. The time in the UK when you landed was 8pm. You landed in a time zone where they set their clocks to be 6 hours behind UK time so that it lines up more with their local daylight hours.
Going by UK time, you left at 12pm and landed at 8pm. 8 hours passed
And by US time, you left the UK at 6am and landed at 2pm. 8 hours passed
The convention of talking about “time gained” and “time lost” is misleading. Time zones are just a convention for setting clocks. If your flight left the UK at noon and you called a friend in America prior to your flight, he’d say that his time is 6am. And if, when you arrived, you called your friend back in the UK, he’d say it was 8pm even though the time in America is 2pm.
ALL of you agree that your flight took 8 hours (ie you neither gained nor lost time). It is simply that you all don’t agree what time it is at any moment.
The time on the clock is essentially just a way of measuring daylight hours.
Since your plane is moving faster than the rotation of the Earth, it’s moving to a spot where the Sun is higher or lower in the sky. Essentially, by moving westwards, you’re making your own day longer. If you had a plane with infinite fuel moving at just the right speed it could move at the same speed the Earth rotates and thus stay in daylight forever–but clearly time is still passing onboard. They just need a different way of measuring it.
To realise that no time has actually been lost or gained, forget your perspective for a moment. Remember that the time back in the UK and the time in the US haven’t actually changed at all. If you flew to the US for a few days then flew back to the UK without ever changing your watch, it would still be completely accurate when you get back. So clearly no time has been gained or lost.
I’m not really sure what you’re asking here. Time doesn’t “go” anywhere. Your 8 hour flight still lasted 8 hours. You didn’t travel in time, all you did was change the time set on your clock to match the local time.
If you are still having trouble, you’ll need to look into how timezones work at all (and how something can be at 7pm eastern at the exact same time as 4pm pacific). Combined with the idea that a clock doesn’t determine time, it only shows something to humans to help us determine time.
Bonus fact I didn’t see in the other answers: the international date line is a + or – (depending on direction) 24-hour change, so it cancels out the 24 one-hour changes that would have happened if you traveled through all of the timezones in a row (or ran in circles around a pole; no calendar traveling shenanigans here). Time still advances at 1 second per second (not-relatively speaking), no matter what a local clock is telling you.
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