I was wondering if it was possible for the entire planet to observe the same day of the week simultaneously at any point of time during a day. I did some google searches and found out that the UTC offsets range over a 26 hour time period. If the time taken by earth to complete one rotation is 24 hours, why do we need to have 26 hour range instead of 24? I also saw that the GMT has 24 hour range of offsets. I am pretty confused by all of this.
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Sure we can call time whatever we want. Time zones are something we completely made up just to make our lives easier. We could all be on ANY time zone, it doesn’t need to be UTC. We could all be on Alaska time if we’d like to! The numbers don’t matter, they are all made up.
Why is it 26 hours instead of 24? Why, because its all made up. Time zones do not necessarily represent accurate science, they are meant to make it easy for the people who live there and people choose their own time zone., and in the case of the extra two– thats exactly what happened
There are a handful of places in the Pacific Ocean that normally would be -11 or -12 hours. The problem with those islands is that they have more business relations with Australia and Asia then they do with America. But if you used the time zones as is, 1:00 PM on a Friday on those islands might be 10:00 AM on a Saturday in Australia, and 10 AM on a Monday in Australia is 1:00 PM on a Sunday on that island, so they really only have 4 days a week they can work together. So some of those places decided to just switch to the other side of the date line so that the schedules would line up better.
>why do we need to have 26 hour range instead of 24?
Because the Pacific is not as empty as one would think.
The international date line is not a straight line, but jumps back and forth East-to-West across the Pacific depending on whether individual Pacific nations want to be on one side or the other. Some of these jumps are large enough that additional time zones are necessary, particularly the Line Islands of the Pacific which are at +14, but which are (broadly) East of the Hawaiian Islands which are at -10.
The time zones UTC+13 and UTC+14 did not exist until 1994. Before that, time zones went from UTC+12 to UTC-12: 24 hours. However, the pacific island nation of Kiribati decided they wanted their date to match their neighbours more closely, so they changed from UTC-11 to UTC+13. Several other islands around Kiribati then did something similar.
So the 26-hour span of the time zones is more political than geographical.
I would seriously appreciate everyone adopting UTC. No daylight savings, no time zones. It’s 5pm everywhere at the same time, even if it’s actually morning for you.
Anyway to answer your question the numbers are all made up. Some islands decided to jump forward/back a day for convenience.
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