The Case for Standard Time

The Case for Standard Time

By Bobby Neal Winters

By the time this reaches the newspaper, we will have endured yet another brutal time change. I hate the time change.  I hate change, but let’s not digress. Many would agree with me on hating the time change and say that we should stay with daylight savings time year round. 

That is where we would part ways.

I’ve no illusion that what I write here will change anyone’s mind, but occasionally, in my role as a scholar, I must choose to die on a hill that no one cares about.  

This is that hill.

We switch between two time frames: Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time.  By the choice of nomenclature, clearly they want us to believe that Daylight Savings Time saves daylight.  It does not.  There is exactly the same amount of daylight regardless.

In contrast to this, Standard Time is standard.  I will now explain why that is. There was a time before clocks. When you got up when the light woke you, and you went to sleep after the dark had made you sleepy.  It was back in the days we were all red in tooth and claw, aka Hobb’s State of Nature.

In getting through the day, people would mark the path of the sun.  How high was it in the sky?  Was it at its high point, half way through the day yet?  If not, that was morning; if it had passed that it was afternoon; but the important part that helped divide it all up was noon.  

Noon was the basic standard.

At some point astronomers (or maybe astrologers, let’s not split that hair) split the day up into finer pieces.  We call them hours. Because the sun travels a semicircle (more or less) across the sky, they begin to think of the whole day/night cycle as a circle.  Because the math was easy, they cut each half of the cycle into twelve pieces.  These pieces are what come down to us as hours.

Before we got clocks, people dealt with time in a much looser way. I’ll get there at noon would mean some time in the middle of the day.

Then we got clocks, and the world got more rigid.  A town big enough to have a clock tower set its time so that it was 12 Noon when the sun was near its zenith.  If you had a watch, you would synchronize your watch with that clock.  Given that, when someone said to meet them at place x at time t, you could do that.  

This worked when the speed of travel and communication was slow. Then the railroad and the telegraph came in and ruined all that.

A system was created that allowed people to communicate around the world. This system went through a number of tweaks through the years.  The system we have now is called Coordinated Universal Time.  We abbreviate this as UTC.  

Shouldn’t that be CUT?

Okay.

The French name of the system is Temps Universel Coordonné and they were involved in the negotiation. I assume they wanted TUC to be the abbreviation. So nobody gets their own way.  

Humans, they make me laugh.

We measure our time in coordinated universal time.  We set up time zones around the world so that the sun is near its zenith at 12 Noon in each of those zones. 

The system is set up so that the base zone called UTC+0 is centered around the prime meridian which runs through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. (Why that is the case is a whole different story.) Both England and France are in UTC+0, by the way, so they didn’t have to compromise on that.

We here, in God’s country, are on UTC-6.  We are 6 hours behind the folks in London and Paris.  In Seoul, South Korea (and Tokyo, Japan) they are at UTC+9.  So they are 10 hours ahead of us.

It’s all there right in the system.  

When we switch to Daylight Savings Time, we add an hour to our offset.  We will be UTC-5.  But most of the folks in the northern hemisphere do too, so the time differences will remain the same.

It becomes trickier when dealing with time differences between hemispheres because when one springs forward, the other falls back, but they don’t all do it at the same time.  

Brazil sticks to Standard Time all year round.  I imagine this is because the time change makes even less sense for them because they are in general nearer to the equator than we are, and it makes even less sense for them than for us.

So there is the case: Having Noon at the middle of the day.  If we are going to stay with one time--as we should--that should be Standard Time.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )