Why are some countries a day behind/ahead others if time moves at the same rate everywhere?
In: Earth Science
Because of timezones.
Yes (for the purposes of normal life and this question, so I’m choosing to ignore time dilation due to gravity) time moves at the same rate everywhere.
Historically, midnight, or 12am, has been in the middle of the night, and noon, or 12pm, has been in the middle of the day (roughly speaking).
This worked for the majority of human history because one person only really cared about what the time was where they were, so if its the middle of the day it must be noon.
but as people and information started traveling further, faster, this didnt work as well. say youre in america in the late 1800s, and youre taking a train from point A, and traveling West to point B. You leave at noon point A time, and ride the train for 3 hours.
You might expect to arrive there at 3pm, but when you get off the train, the clock on the townhall only says 2:30. How is this possible?
Well, each town had set their clock relative to the sun, hitting noon when the sun is the highest, but since youve traveled west, the town you arrived in has a sunrise at a different instance than the town you came from in the east, since the earth is a spinning ball.
This confused people, and needed a solution for scheduling trains and communications and stuff. Hypothetically, everyone could pick one time and just use that, but that would make times very weird for some people
say you picked NYC as your base point, and said noon, 12pm, when the sun is highest in NYC will be noon everywhere. People who lived on los angelos, california would go “wtf thats weird, the sun has barely risen here that doesnt make any sense.”
So instead they came up with timezones, so they could somewhat standardize time by knowing the timezone difference in two locations, while also allowing people to keep their normal schedule of having noon in the middle of the day (roughly).
this more accurately represents how say at noon in NYC, the sun is already setting in Moscow Russia, and it is already around the middle of the night in Australia. and then how at 6pm in NYC, it is already the early morning in Australia with the sun starting to rise soon.
Latest Answers