And be gentle. I’m very stupid about understanding time zones.
Yesterday I woke up in NYC and promptly flew two time zones to the west. Far as I can tell, I had a 26-hour long day yesterday. If I did this every day, in twelve days I would have had twelve consecutive 26-hour days, and then I could start again.
If I had unlimited money, and wished to spend my life having days with an extra two hours (and didn’t mind that some chunk of that longer day would be spent flying, and moving into a different hotel every day, etc.), would I be able to have an extra two hours in my day or what? I know there’s some kind of illusion operating here, but damned if I can figure out what it is.
You would have to always head west to do that…you’d lose the extra two hours coming back otherwise. Also, you wouldn’t really gain two hours, you’d just be doing things like working, eating and sleeping at different times each day.
Well, yes, traveling west perpetually is part of the premise here. And what I’m not seeing is how I wouldn’t have an actual 26-hour long day. Yesterday wasn’t just a regular day for me. I got off the plane, set my watch back two hours, and added those two hours to my day. Of course I’ll lose them when I fly back to NYC, but my question asks what if I just kept flying west every day?
I’m thinking that the Int’l Date Line figures in here somehow, but as I said I’m very stupid in understanding time zones, so I’m not sure how, Mangetout.
If you advance your personal calenday by one “day” every time you completed 26 hours you would find that you had to skip a whole calendar day to be in sync with the local calendar on each westward circumnavigation. If you are happy to allow your personal calendar to drift by one day in twelve from the local one then no problems: nothing gained, of course!
As you note, if you return to NY by flying east, you’ll “give back” the 2 hours you gained - your day will be 22 hours long (measured from one local midnight to the next).
If you pursue your scheme of heading west and enjoying 26-hour days, you’ll eventually cross the Date Line where you must “give back” 24 hours - a full day.
In either case, when you’re back in NY both your date and time will be the same as told by a local who never left.
I don’t think there’s any real illusion. You can keep heading west, pursuing 26-hour days. You’ll simply have fewer of them.
Every 24 hours, the earth has rotated completely, whether you travel west or east. 26 hours into into any journey and the earth has completed one rotation and is two hours into the next.
The most you can gain moving west from New York is whatever the time difference is upto the International Date Line. You’ll ‘give back’ 24 hours when you cross it, so you’ll actually be losing time. The most you can gain is if you live just to the west of the date line and move west accross the world just to the east of it and settle down there. You’ll add a whole day to your life. The down side is that you’ll probably spend two days travelling and will have to live in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Other than that you can enjoy your extra day any way you like.
If the OP were correct, you could save a lot of trouble by merely staying in New York and setting your watch back 2 hours each day. As others have pointed out, your “days” would be longer, but you’d have fewer of them.
Do you think you could travel back in time, by setting your watch back 2 hours each hour?
You can’t fool Father Time any more than Mother Nature.
On a somewhat related note, when I was on break in college, I decided that I liked to sleep 10 to 11 hours a night, and I enjoyed being awake for 16 to 18 hours each day. So I attempted an experiment over a month in which I slept for 10 to 11 hours, then stayed active for 16 to 18 hours before retiring. Each “work day” for me was, in fact, 26 to 29 hours.
It was fine for many days, but when I started rising at odd times – 7 pm, 1 am, and then trying to find something to do through the wee hours of the night in a small New England town, it got boring. After two or three weeks, it got very disorientating – like my body was telling me, pick a schedule for sleeping and rising that has some connection to the sun, damn you!! – and I dropped the whole thing.
What I’m saying is, that even if you could magically add two hours to each day by constantly moving west, I’m quite confident that there’s a point at which your sleep patters would get disrupted to the point that you’d feel compelled to return to a normal 24 hour day. I can’t explain any science behind it, but it sure happened to me.
Essentially, what would happen is that you’d take off from the east side of the ITZ, having enjoyed, say, 15 hours of Monday; you fly west two time zones, crossing the ITZ and you will experience a 26-hour ‘day’, but the remaining 11 hours of it are actually happening on Tuesday, locally. Get the timing right and I think you can skip a day altogether; taking off from the east side late on Monday evening, landing on the west side early Wednesday morning, but only experiencing one ‘night’ (i.e. period of darkness) in between.
There was a study done, and I don’t have details beyond what’s in my memory, but I think I read about it first in one of those Time-Life book series on the sciences that dealt with “Time.” The gist of the study involved some researchers/experimenters going into an underground lab and therefore having no reference to “natural” light. I forget how long they were down there, and exactly how they kept record of their times (watches and clocks I guess) but over the course of some weeks or months, they moved into a 25-hour cycle of activites like eating, sleeping, working, toilet habits and other things than tend to be “daily” ones.
The next question to be answered, if there’s anything really important in that experiment, is how did we go from a 25-hour awareness (assuming this did happen sometime in the past to the people who had control over time-keeping) to a 24-hour one. The stars are our best time keeping devices (they do their thing in almost 24 hours) but the variations in daylight as dictated by the seasons make the lengths of “days” (the light hours) and “nights” (the dark hours) expand and contract over the course of the year.
The time zones issues are recent (from the days of train travel in the 19th Century) and travel fast enough to show up their inadequacies (mid-20th Century onwards) even more recent, so trying to get a good grasp on what our “natural” sense of time as far as the 24-hour vs. 25-hour (or your 26-hour) day may be, will probably require some much more serious and involved research.
At the very least, if we are to change our time-keeping techniques, we’ll have to convince people to quit paying any attention to the sun and stars as having anything to do with “natural time.” All I can say to that (seeing how wonderfully malleable humans are to changes in systems of measurement) is, “Best of luck.”
Consider what happened on Magellen’s first circumnavigation of the globe. When they returned to their home port, on the ship they thought it was Wednesday, when it was really Thursday in the port.
They were doing something similar to your concept, except they were adding mere minutes to each day; after all, the sun set later in the day than if they were standing still. Assuming they travelled 15 degrees west each day (which is way too fast for them, they took 16 months to go around the world, but anyway), they would add one hour each day, but each morning they had a new dawn and reset their bodies’ schedules. When they crossed the still to be established International Date Line in the Pacific, they should have added a full day.
So like Magellen, when you get back to your home “port”, you’re going to have to reset your calendar and skip the day that you already spent.
I won’t quibble with the 24-hour noon-to-noon notion, beyond saying it isn’t precisely 24 hours.
The inadequacy of the time zones is that they’re really quite arbitrary and arbitrarily enforced. There are even threads here discussing the time zones that deal with people living near the borders of time zones. They’re okay in the “big picture” sense, but at the level of individuals they can cause major headaches.
Currently most people cycle through a wake17/sleep7 (or close to it) day every 24 hours. At the end of a 30 day month they will have accumulated 510 waking hours and 210 sleeping hours.
Now if we wanted to achieve a 26 hour day we could cycle with a wake19/sleep7 day. At the end of the 30 days we would now get 526 waking hours and 194 sleeping hours. Apparently this gets fouled up however because your cycle will become out of wack with the sun rise/fall thing.
So, If we can defeat the problem of 24 hour sun rise/fall cycle by making it a 26 hour sun rise/fall cycle by doing exactly what the OP suggests (adding 2 extra hours of daylight by jumping west):
Will our bodies adjust to the 26 hour sun rise/fall cycle along with the wake19/sleep7 cycle and can we really gain 16 more waking hours in our new 28 day month?
You could also travel from one time zone to the next every hour (possible some day) and you can leave at 8pm and it will always be 8pm. You can just follow the darkness around the globe and never see daylight.
When you get all the way around, while it seems you have kept it 8pm endlessly, when you get back to your starting pint, it is 8pm the next day, even though you could have stopped your watch when you left and convinced yourself you have suspended time.