Matt Heath: We need to make time for everyone

Photo / Northern Advocate, Michael Cunningham

Opinion

OPINION:

Like many New Zealanders, I'm not a fan of time. To be more precise, I'm sick of it being 9am here and 5pm yesterday somewhere else. It's confusing.

It would be easier if everyone ran at the same hour. If no matter the solar time in a given location, we all had the same clock number. Some lunchtimes would occur at 3:00, others at 11:00, and some at 12:00, but what does that matter? The sun's position would be the same - just the clock number assigned would be different. Your pie, jam doughnut and V will taste the same no matter the clock number. Under this system, booking international online meetings would be easier. You could tell five people in different parts of the world, '11:00, September 19', and they'd all know when that was. The middle of the night for some, mid-arvo for others, but the number would be the same.

Time zones are a simple concept in and of themselves. There are 360 degrees of global longitude. Dividing that by the number of hours in a day creates 24 15-degree zones, 1665km wide. A timezone is offset by the number of zones it is from the Prime Meridian, an imaginary line that was placed through the globe from Greenwich in 1884. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is clock time rather than solar time. My question is, why do we bother offsetting? It's just a number.

Time was originally measured by the placement of the sun overhead. A sundial dictated what time it was in each small region. This became problematic with the advent of trains. They were fast enough to make different times in different places an issue. Not knowing when another train will be on a track tends to cause horrific head-on collisions. So, a standard measure of time was set, and eventually extended around the globe. A great system in Victorian times, which has become slightly annoying since the advent of international calls, and now free Zooming.

China already does what I am suggesting within its borders. The country is as wide as the United States but sticks to the one time zone. Beijing time, GMT+ 8. They cope with starting work at different clock numbers. How much time would America save in sports promotion if they had one zone instead of six? Even here in New Zealand, we do this to an extent. Invercargill should be 25 mins behind Wellington.

To see test if my plan is worth pursuing, I Zoomed in on a man who actually knows what he's talking about. Dr Adam Dunford is a senior research scientist at the Measurement Standards Laboratory (MSL) who looks after not just our seconds but also our metres, volts, and other things without which modern life would be difficult to imagine. Sometimes referred to as New Zealand's 'Time Lord', he appears on my screen from Wellington in front of an impressive bank of atomic clocks. After bonding over the Dr Who-related items we both happen to have on hand - I ask.

Hey, Time Lord, why can't we all keep the same time everywhere in the world?

"Well, we do. There is already a globally unified time system. Just hardly anyone uses it in daily life. UTC is always UTC everywhere. So if everyone simply scheduled their meetings in UTC, you would be fine. If you look at the clocks behind me, they don't show New Zealand time. MSL maintains our country's version of UTC, as do other time labs around the world. Mostly, 'ordinary' time is just offset from UTC, which is often how 'legal time' is specified."

Do you think people would embrace dumping the offsetting?

"I suspect you'd get a human push-back because most people don't deal with time in the way you're suggesting. For them, there's already a perfectly good system running which means a 'day' is roughly the same dark/light cycle regardless of where you are. As humans, we're creatures of day and night and that's built right into our bodies. They might not want to change the time of their lunch from the middle of the day. Also, you would effectively be doing away with daylight saving. People might not like that."

After an hour of me punishing Adam with time questions, I let him get back to his measurements. But still buzzing on the subject, I feel compelled to take a look back in time. During the English feudal era, one measure of time was a pissing-while: the time it takes to whizz.
Someone would say, 'How long will you be in the field?'
'I dunno mate, about 10 pissingwhiles.'
Imagine trying to book an international Zoom chat using that system.