The phrase nobody has mentionned yet is “circadian rhythms” – it’s your natural body clock, which is affected by the light/dark cycles in your day and also by the times you eat.
Messing with your cycle (by, for example, moving up to the Arctice Circle and having 24 hours of sunlight a day) will screw you up, slowly but surely.
On a more personal note, my circadian rhythm is on the long end – given no external stimulus (nagging wife, usually), I tend to go to sleep one hour later than I did the day before. This makes me incredibly adept at adjusting to jet lag when I travel westward, and horrible at adjusting to jet lag when I travel eastward. I usually end up sleeping a little later each night until sleep deprivation catches up with me, and then I’m on a 24-hour cycle (but constantly sleep-deprived). What I would give to slow the Earth’s rotation by 1 hr!
When I saw the title of the thread, I thought someone was proposing we slow down our clocks so that there would be 26 hours in a day instead of only 24. My reaction was “Why would you pick 26?”
Along that line, someone has already mentioned that a day isn’t exactly 24 hours long. The earth is slowing down, so that a long time from now one side will always face the sun (as the moon faces the earth). Because of this fact, there will be a time when there will be 26 hours in a day…and then 40 hours and then…504 hours, etc. until a day will be forever. [sup]but don’t hold your breath[/sup]
The situation in the OP does stay with the sun, so I would imagine that it could work. You’d spend a fortune on plane tickets, but I do believe it would work.
I know I already replied to these questions (above) but I had another idea about this and decided to post it here as opposed to starting another thread about it.
I’ll wager, although I haven’t done the map browsing to verify it, that there are places that are due north or due south of other places (thus sharing the older definitions of “noon” where the midday moment was defined by when the sun crossed “the meridian” at that spot) but which are in different time zones.
I’m not sure of this, but I think I am, that Indianapolis, which is almost due north of Nashville, is at the moment on the same time as Nashville only because Indianapolis is on EST where Nashville is on CDT. Once Nashville reverts to CST it’s an hour earlier than Indianapolis.
Do you know of similar anomalies engendered by time zone hiccups?
I’m willing to believe that upsetting the frequency of our daily routine might have long-term consequences, but I find it hard to accept that it would make much difference to us if we just stayed awake a few hours less or more in total per month (or whatever).
Our requirement for amount of sleep is not absolute anyway; it’s a bit adjustable for most people (a lot adjustable for others).
This is certainly true (as this map shows). For it not to be, timezones would need to be exclusively defined by lines of longitude. That would be a highly logical system, but very unrealistic - in the real world, political boundaries are bound to introduce complications.
But I don’t really see how this makes timezones “inadequate”.
And it nonetheless remains true that if you stand in one spot and mark the time when the sun reaches its highest point, you’ll find it’s 24 hours to the next such event.
Your answer revealed something else that I wondered. Why not a 25 hour day. Voila when you mentioned adding a 13, I realized that adding a 12-1/2 was not possible, but we could go entirely to digital. [sup]I did realize that an hour would have to be shortened.[/sup]
Right - since the earth is orbiting the sun, it’s a sidereal day of just under 24 hours.
What are those timezone inadequancies? (They look rather adequate to me, if occasionally somewhat convoluted.)
For what they were created for, helping train schedules be less finicky by not having to take “local time” (based on when noon happened to arrive at that precise location) into account, they are reasonably adequate. But with jetliners able to travel westward faster that the earth’s rotation and thus arrive “before” they take off, I’d vote for that being an inadequacy.
As I mentioned (above) in an earlier reply, people living near the edges of time zones and carrying on business and other affairs with those “across the border” in another zone, it’s more than a little inconvenient, which I can also regard as inadequate. The Indianapolis/Nashville anomaly is another example of how local governments stomp all over the “adequacy” issue.
To spin this around, what convinces you that the time zones are adequate?
To begin with, they are obviously necessary. Humans are incurably diurnal, so there’s no real prospect of using the same clock all over the world. The old scheme of every town and village having its own clock had drawback too obvious to need mention. Timezones are the obvious compromise - keep one clock over a moderately broad area.
Clearly, if you live on the edge of such an area some complications will ensue. But there’s no way around that. And in general, things work - it’s rather easy to be on time for work, or to catch a scheduled train or flight. Yet nearly all of us can retain the concept of it being dark at midnight and bright at noon. Literature referring to such things can be understood around the world.
Seems adequate to me. If there’s a better scheme, I’ve yet to hear of it.
[sup]but don’t hold your breath[/sup]
[sup]I did realize that an hour would have to be shortened.[/sup]