You just need to go around the world fast enough that it’s always one time.
Linear timezones would be weird
I don’t think they would even be called timezone! The whole concept falls apart.
It’d be a… timeline? That would be more confusing. You’d be dealing with spatioemporal coordinates just to get to work in the morning.
Time does not go in lines… it goes in circles! That is why clocks are round!
Timefield?
Time spectrum?
It wouldn’t be that far from how it worked before the invention of the railways, each town had its own local time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time
The history of timekeeping is pretty interesting in itself.
In ye-olde-days before everyone had clock most of europe had flexible time. sunrise is at 6am, noon is when the sun is heighest, and sunset is at 6pm. 9 am is between soon and sunrise. Obviously that means during winter, an hour in the night is longer than an hour during the day, but nobody really cares about that anyway.
Then we got clocks, and they would generally be the church bell. So everywhere in hearing range of the church had a single timezone, whose accuracy would depend mostly on the clock they had and they’d synchronise that with noon occasionally. Of course, that clock would say something else from the old system. Sunrise is at 6 in the morning, or at 7.32 “on the clock” (o’clock). Of course most old clocks didn’t have minute hands, or were in any way external, so it would be “roughly half past seven” at best.
The old system of church time turned into railroad time, and there are amazing paintings and photographs and museum pieces of a station that had 3 clocks: its own time, and the time of the next station in either direction. By this time, almost nobody nobody used the old “split daytime in 12” system anymore.
But then countries started to think they really needed to synchronise their timezone. So most countries picked a big church either in the capital or in a big city in the middle of the country and declared that to be the time in their country. The Netherlands, for example, decided in 1909 that they like GMT +0h 19m 32s and 13milliseconds. Germany picked GMT +1h. The Netherlands realized this was stupid in 1937 and moved to GMT +20m, for a very short time. Of course, the fact that a national time existed didn’t stop many cities from sticking to railway time anyway, and for a short time, everyone had 2 different times again (if you didn’t live in the capital).
And then between 1938 and 1940, basically all of europe was… motivated… to pick one timezone, which just happened to be the German one, and we stuck to it ever since.
AKA solar time. It’s really quite natural. Man made time zones are truly bizarre.
It’s only as bizarre as you tell yourself it is. I find them a lot more practical than literally following the sun.
Oh, they certainly are practical. Especially when you’re setting up a meeting with people living in different cities.
However, when you look at the time zones of China, you begin to notice things. Turns out, 12 o’clock has nothing to do with midday, but at least meeting times are nice and easy.
This is actually correct, but not for the reason you might think. It has nothing to do with time zones.
In physics, time is quite literally defined as “what a clock would read”. As you approach the speed of light, time dilation approaches infinity and therefore your rate of proper time approaches zero.
If you reach the speed of light, your rate of proper time exactly equals zero and thus the clock is correct 100% of the time.
There is one caveat: in order to reach the speed of light, your mass must equal exactly zero. In which case you can only travel at the speed of light since deceleration is not possible.
Bearing that in mind, it would be correct from a physics standpoint to claim that a broken clock accurately measures the proper time of a photon (or other massless particle).
Even more apt: a zero mass clock would be broken a priori
At C, wouldn’t time be pretty much irrelevant though?
Sounds to me that even though your massless clock would be always right, time doesn’t really mean anything in that situation. It’s like having a ruler for measuring how purple yesterday is.
Only if you ignore that minutes and seconds exist.
But if you ignore timezones, you could stop a clock at noon, and just fly around the earth keeping the sun dead above you.
Or just go to the south pole and meander round in a circle.
The international space station makes a full orbit around the earth every 90 minutes. A broken clock can be correct 16 times a day.
So nobody has ever broken the clock faceplate or glass cover but had a still functioning clock, huh?
Technically correct but impractical on all accounts.
At the equator, Earth is nearly 25k miles around. So you need to travel around 1050 mph. The speed of sound is usually under 800 mph, so you’ll be going a good bit faster than this. That is going to be one impressive fuel tank. Still that is a whole lot less than the 17k mph you need to get to the space station.
But near the poles, it’s much more doable!
- Adolf Hitler on creation of Fourth Reich
Ouch.
Also bravo
So, once a day then?
Only at 6pm, all day
A man stumbles into a kitchen, bouncing against the fridge, knocking most of the magnets and art to the ground. He throws open the door, and pulls out a silver can. He cracks the lid and a spray of foam dashes against the blinds over the sink. He wanders a few steps and kicks the fridge door closed, while halfway draining the can in one draft. A young boy is eating cereal at the counter, dressed for school.
“Dad, are you seriously this drunk this early? This is exactly why mom doesn’t come home anymore.”
“It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!”
The boy grips his spoon hard enough to bend it in one hand, as he eyes a shattered clock slumped against the wall in the corner, it’s bent arms forever indicating a time when the fragile peace of a household became just as fractured.
“Not anymore, dad.”
