Time Is Meaningless

 

Time Is Meaningless
by Rob Cottignies

You were probably born on two days.

Unless your birth was between midnight in American Samoa and midnight at the International Date Line, your life began on what you consider your birthday AND the day after.

All of Earth experiences being in the same calendar day once every 24 hours, giving you a 1-in-24 chance of being extra special.

(If you would like to do the math, American Samoa is GMT-11, which means 11 hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, the home base for time zones. Living on the east coast of the United States, my time is five hours less than GMT (GMT-5), putting American Samoa six hours behind me. And, since I enjoy over-explaining things: If the current time in Greenwich, England is 5:00am on Tuesday, my eastern U.S. time is midnight of Monday going into Tuesday while it is 6:00pm Monday in American Samoa’s time zone. If you are still confused, learning military time would make things easier. And get a calculator.)

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Before time zones and mechanical clocks, people used sundials, which were effective locally but impossible to sync worldwide. Our Sun appears in differently depending on location and time of year, giving various definitions of how long daytime is and even when “noon” comes around.

The sundial method ceased when trains became prevalent and more people were traveling. Watches had to be adjusted at every stop to keep track of the “local” time.

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Time zones have been pointless yet controversial since Scottish engineer Sandford Fleming introduced them in 1876.

China, the world’s fourth-largest country by size, has one time zone.

Smaller in size, Australia has three.

Including overseas territories, France (which is smaller than both China and Australia) has 12, the most of any nation.

In 2010, Russia reduced its number of time zones from 11 to nine yet neighboring countries along the same lines of latitude did not alter theirs.

Can we all agree that time zones are silly, even useless?

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Speaking of useless, Daylight Saving Time.

The idea was first proposed (though a satirical article written by Benjamin Franklin may have inspired it) by New Zealand entomologist (insect researcher) George Hudson in 1784. He wanted to skip time ahead by two hours “to go bug-hunting” and so others could enjoy more Sunlight later in non-Summer months.

After some tuning, the familiar one-hour jump was implemented in 1916 by Germany to conserve energy usage. (More Sunlight = less artificial light.) The United States adopted the practice in 1918, which farmers protested less than a year later.

Farmers disapproved of the idea because it meant disrupting their carefully-crafted work schedules. Dairy farmers were particularly angry since cows are apparently awful at adjusting to changes in milking times.

Currently, around 36% of countries observe Daylight Saving Time. Nations near the Equator do not, since their hours of daylight stay consistent throughout the year. Most of Asia and Africa abstain, though many nations practiced it at one time.

These places have managed to be productive without promoting a made-up part of a made-up system. Shocking!

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This brings me back to the main idea of time being invented and therefore arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.

A worldwide time zone would be great. Keep 24 hours in the day but make it the same time everywhere.

Does it matter that some people's bedtime will be 9am while others have breakfast at 7pm? Nope! After all, humans invented time (based on astronomical records) so we reserve the right to mess with it.

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Remember when the world was “supposed to” end in 2012?

I remember asking, ‘2012 according to who?’

Eastern Asian cultures tally their own differing years, Jewish people base theirs on the Torah, certain native tribes mark years in their own ways, yet the generally-accepted worldwide year (at the "time" of this writing) is 2021.

For a curious aspect regarding 2021, negative years exist. What!?

Saying something happened in 400 _B.C. (or _B.C.E.) is equivalent to saying it occurred in the year ‘negative 400’. What a strange system.

And what did the people who lived then call their time?

Well, many things.

They counted their years based on important events, such as the founding of Rome, the first Olympic Games, the Yellow Emperor of China, or various religious occurrences.

(A huge debate regards the year zero- when it was, how to calculate it, and if there were actually two, 0 _B.C.E. and 0 _C.E. Exciting topics in the time-keeping world.)

In fact, basing the current year on Jesus's birth is likely incorrect.

Scholars and the Bible itself give about a ten-year range of his birth, meaning we could have reached this millennium in the mid-90s or mid-aughts, which is the obnoxious phrase for the years 2000-2009.

The abbreviations _B.C.E. (before common era) and _C.E. (common era) were introduced as non-religious equivalents to _B.C. (before Christ) and _A.D. (anno domini; Latin for 'year of our lord'). The attempt is nice but everybody knows where the year's number came from.

It is time for that to change.

Those in charge of such things should get together to rename the year so everyone- religious believers, secularists, scientists, and anybody else- can accept it. There are great minds in all these categories. Make it work.

OR…

Forget years altogether.

Days and months make sense because of agriculture and other factors but years are really meaningless outside of remembering and predicting. Dates are not important.

Just remember that something happened and its details.

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A related facet is how the days of the week were named.

In English, four days were named for Norse (a.k.a. Nordic) gods, one after a Roman god, and one each for the Sun and the Moon.

Other languages call them different things.

For instance, what English calls Thursday, Germans call Donnerstag. Thursday was named for Thor, the Norse god of thunder. 'Donner' is the German word for 'thunder'. How exciting!

But those same Germans call Wednesday Mittwoch, which simply means ‘middle of the week’.

(In English, Thor’s godly father is called Odin, but Wednesday comes from one of his alternate names, Woden.)

What a mess.

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Most people probably think time cannot be altered. Why not!? Like country borders, humans made them up and continue to do so.

If the world could agree on what time it is, imagine how else we could get along.

 

 

Thanks to these websites for aiding in my research:

Live Science, Time And Date, Web Exhibits, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Stanford University