Because it’s **defined ** to be so. Before 1884, people did indeed set their clocks according to “local solar noon”, but then Greenwich Mean Time was established as the international reference point. Cecil has a Straight Dope column about this here. What this means is that “noon” in Sydney is no longer determined directly by where the sun is in the sky, but by a globally-agreed upon slicing of the world into “time zones”. This makes life much easier for all concerned. So it doesn’t matter that Sydney isn’t exactly 150 degrees east of Greenwich. “Sydney time” i.e. the time that all official clocks, airport clocks, radio and TV clocks strive to be accurate to, is exactly GMT+10, not GMT+10 and a few minutes. There’s an hour difference for Daylight Saving Time, when relevant, but that can be accounted for.
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That would have been the correct usage before 1884. Nowadays, if you’re meeting someone for lunch at noon, do you get out your sextant and take a solar reading or simply meet when your watch says it’s 12:00?
But it is exactly GMT+10 (correct for DST if applicable). That’s the beauty of the post-1884 system!
I can’t tell you when the sun is at its highest, but I can tell you when your watch reads 12:00. For instance, right now it’s 11:45am Pacific Time. You’re on the East Coast, right, Trunk? OK, through the magic of the system I know that your watch says 2:45pm, even though I don’t know exactly where you’re located! Now, imagine that you woke up today with amnesia, and are suddenly “LOST” in your own location. You somehow let me know that the sun was at its highest today at 12:53pm, according to your watch which you know is set to Eastern Daylight Time. I can calculate that your Longitude is about 76 degrees and 36 minutes West (I hope my math is correct, I’m a bit rushed at the moment).
Put it another way: let’s imagine that two of the “LOST” survivors are from Maine and Ohio, and that due to forgetfulness they haven’t adjusted their watches since leaving home. Their watches will read the same, and be potentially just as useful as any other watch on the island, provided that they know that the watch is set for Eastern Standard (or Daylight, as applicable) Time. It doesn’t matter when the sun is at its zenith in Maine or Ohio, because since 1884 that’s not how we keep time. However, if you’re “LOST”, you can use your watch to calculate your longitude rather accurately.
All of that said, I agree that this is not going to happen on the series. My posts are in the spirit of fighting ignorance to the meager extent that I can.
Wouldn’t the series be different if the plane was full of Dopers returning from a G’Dopefest in Sydney, huh? Qadgop the Mercotan would have fixed up the injured Marshal better than Jack, I bet. We’d have Latitude and Longitude by the second day. The corpses would have been disposed of. We’d have fixed the transceiver and rigged up batteries from the surviving cell phones / laptops / PDAs to keep it running.
Colibri would be showing us what is edible in a rainforest. Polycarp would be providing, oh, let’s see, many fishes (someone would be spearing fish!). And so on – but that’s another thread (LOSTdope)?.
