Time Zone Madness

Prepare for a long hike, then go outside at exactly noon. Check that the sun is directly over head, and check that your watch says 12:00. Now, walk east or west. You don’t have to be in a rush. In fact, take your time.

Now, say it takes you a year to walk from Virginia to Illinois. At the end of that year, your watch and the sun will not be in sync. When the sun is directly over head, like when you started your trip at noon, your watch now says 11:00a.m.

Say it takes you another year to reach Colorado, and then another year to reach California. When the sun is directly over your head in California, your watch would say 9:00 a.m. This seems like standard time zone knowledge, but really, it isn’t.

If every day of your year-long walk, you looked up at the noon sun, when did your watch start being wrong? It wouldn’t suddenly jump when you crossed the invisible time zone “border.” It would slowly happen over all the 365 days. One day your watch and the sun would be one minute apart, then another day two minutes apart, then eventually 60 minutes apart, then 61 minutes, then 120 minutes, and so on. But at no point during the long walk would you feel the difference in time. It’s not like a plane flight where you go from one time zone to another quickly.

You look up at the sun one day, and then 24 hours later you look up at it again. Do this many times and eventually there’s a difference — but 24 hours is 24 hours, yes? If you judge the 24 hours by the sun reaching noon, your watch must have changed. If you judge the 24 hours by your watch, the sun’s pattern must have changed? At no one point during the long walk did the “flow of time” seem to change, but yet you have hard evidence that it did change.

I fully understand the physics and mathematics of the situation. But the reality of a watch and the sun falling out of sync for showing 24 hours twists my little brain in a way I can’t grasp. This has never bothered me when I’ve flown across the country, in either direction, but thinking about the long walk change just flabbergasts me.

Maybe I’m just too simple. Or maybe . . . oh, look, something shiny.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com