So I understand that there are time zones and the time at any given moment varies across locations, BUT is there a more subtle difference from place to place? For example, does southern California and northern California have like a time difference of a couple seconds or something like that? Is every location, no matter how far from each other, slightly different? Because, for me, it doesn’t make sense that there is just some line that you cross and all of a sudden you’re 1 hour ahead or 2 hours ahead etc.
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I think you’re working from the assumption that 12 noon means the sun is at the highest point in the sky, which is not actually true for most places (because we use time zones). There is something called ‘solar noon’ which you can look up for any given place, and it might be 11:56am in one place and 12:12 in another, because they are not exactly in the centre of their time zone. As others have pointed out, ‘time’ doesn’t really exist anyway, so it’s not technically another time, but the sun is in a very slightly different position in the sky (moving east-west only). It jumps at those imaginary lines because we said it should – the difference from ‘true noon’ is enough that we start a new time zone.
I think you’re working from the assumption that 12 noon means the sun is at the highest point in the sky, which is not actually true for most places (because we use time zones). There is something called ‘solar noon’ which you can look up for any given place, and it might be 11:56am in one place and 12:12 in another, because they are not exactly in the centre of their time zone. As others have pointed out, ‘time’ doesn’t really exist anyway, so it’s not technically another time, but the sun is in a very slightly different position in the sky (moving east-west only). It jumps at those imaginary lines because we said it should – the difference from ‘true noon’ is enough that we start a new time zone.
I think you’re working from the assumption that 12 noon means the sun is at the highest point in the sky, which is not actually true for most places (because we use time zones). There is something called ‘solar noon’ which you can look up for any given place, and it might be 11:56am in one place and 12:12 in another, because they are not exactly in the centre of their time zone. As others have pointed out, ‘time’ doesn’t really exist anyway, so it’s not technically another time, but the sun is in a very slightly different position in the sky (moving east-west only). It jumps at those imaginary lines because we said it should – the difference from ‘true noon’ is enough that we start a new time zone.
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