Here’s some freaky stuff to think about. Time is an essentially human invention. It doesn’t exist other than our observation of it. Now there are ways in which we can say that time passes whether or not we know it. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about hours, minutes, seconds, even years. They’re all made up. All of them.
For some bizarre reason we measure small bits of time using a crazy Babylonian scheme that counts things from 1 to 60. I can’t even begin to tell you how little sense that makes. It would make far more sense to have 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute. But we don’t.
When it comes to measuring larger bits of time, we say that a year is the amount of time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun. Except it isn’t. It takes roughly 365.25 days for the earth to return to the same relative position to the sun’s surface. But, the sun doesn’t have a surface and it’s always bubbling and moving and bulging. Not only that, because the sun is moving throughout the galaxy and the galaxy is moving in relation to the universe, the earth never actually returns to the same point. It’s all made up.
Time zones: the ultimate head trip
And then there are time zones. Time zones pay only a passing relationship to anything objective, but they’re designed that way. If you were truly to measure days, you’d say that when the sun was at its highest point in the sky (whenever that was,) that’s “noon.” It will appear at a point in the sky that’s slightly higher or lower the next day, after roughly 24 hours. Because the earth is tilted as it rotates and that amount of tilt changes, the length of a “day” as measured that way is always changing. Not only that but it’s different depending on how far north or south you are.
For thousands of years, that definition of “day” served us. It was all we needed. We were farmers, gatherers, and hunters. We mostly needed to know when to plant and roughly when it would be light enough or dark enough to do what we wanted. More precision than that wasn’t important.
Then came railroads.
Our modern obsession with time
It’s hard to overestimate the effect that railroads had in creating the life we have today. A railroad shrank the amount of time it took to get things drastically. It improved communication. More than any other industry, railroads built the modern economy we have today, where small groups of people have large amounts of wealth and are largely shielded from being taxed. (This isn’t a political blog, I’ll leave it there.)
And, railroads created an obsession with time. Rail cars needed to keep moving. Specific schedules were created saying when a train would be in a specific place and those schedules needed to be honored. The problem was, though, if you left Urbana at 1:15 and went to Wichita, your watch may say you arrived at 6:00. But, in Urbana, they might think it was 6:25. There was no standardization.
The first country to standardize time was England. “Railway time” was established in 1840 and relied on the time measured at the royal observatory in Greenwich. (This later became known as Greenwich Mean Time and is the basis for all worldwide time zones.) Those kooky cats in Greenwich had been measuring time precisely for almost 200 years at that point so they were pretty good at it.
Time comes to America
US Railroads were quick to take notice of the calming effect of Railway Time in Britain, but it was not until about forty years later that all the railroads and the government finalized an arrangement for the US. Several “time zones” were established, the goal being to have a large area with standardized time that sort of kind of had noon be in the middle of the day. This worked for the most part although out toward the edges, where time zones met up, the sun was never overhead in the middle of the day.
Things got weirder as we all know in the 20th century when the government mandated Summer Time. We know it now as Daylight Saving Time and it just arbitrarily sets clocks so that they have nothing to do with when the sun is above us. At this point, there are large chunks of the country where 12:00 comes at least an hour away from the time when the sun is highest. And we all accept this. It’s just part of our lives.
Politics
And then, politics got involved. There are places in this country that don’t observe Daylight Saving Time. California pledged to observe it year round but the federal government won’t let them. As for us in Detroit, we really should be in the Central Time Zone but the Detroiters in the early 20th century didn’t want that. So we’re not.
All of that pales in comparison to Spain. Spain should definitely not be in the Time Zone it is. Spain aligns closely to Greenwich Mean Time, but in the 1940s the country adopted Central European Time in solidarity with the German government. The result is that the sun rises and sets ridiculously late there.
But it’s all in your mind, really
You can fuss about time zones, or time in general if you want to. As I said though, it’s all made up. As long as we all agree what time it is, then it doesn’t matter. And really, does anybody really know what time it is?
