Distortions in space-time - Funny time zones

When you arrive in a new city, the first thing to do is work out what time it is. But have you ever wondered about how this time is worked out? Have you ever noticed that some of the times are just weird? Let me explain...

The whole idea of a time zone came about during the expansion of the railroads in England. Prior to this, noon was always the local time when the sun was at its highest. No-one cared what time it was anywhere else, just local time. After all, with no phones or planes, who cares! The problems started when the railroad companies started issuing timetables. If a train was to leave at noon, was that noon in London or noon in Edinburgh?

A decision was made to affix time based upon the Greenwich observatory in London. All time would then be based upon the time in London. For the first time, every clock in London could be set to the same time. But what about the rest of the world?

To work out the relative time in a place, you just need to know the longitude of your location. Working out longitude is pretty complicated. There’s a lot of books about this. Read them. They’re fun. Anyway, once you know your longitude, you know your time.

The world spins once in 24 hours. The longitude system has 360 degrees. Using a bit of mathematics, you come up with the equation that every 15 degrees of longitude means a one hour difference in time. Sounds, easy right? Mathematically, it is, but then politics get involved.

Not everyone is happy with this simple equation. The idea is, that every 15 degrees, you add another hour. In Australia though, this didn’t quite work out. Adelaide is 7.5 hours ahead of GMT, whilst Melbourne is 8. Why the half hour? The idea was that Adelaide was so close to Melbourne, that a one hour difference was too much, so half an hour difference would be better. Plain stupid if you ask me!

Things get weirder in Asia. The country of Malaysia covers a wide range of longitudes. It has the bit on the Malay peninsula, but it also has the bits near Brunei on the island of Borneo. For some odd reason, it was decided to have one time zone for the entire country. Which time zone to use? Based on the longitude, Kuala Lumpur should be GMT+7 and the Borneo bits should be GMT+8. For some reason, GMT+8 was chosen. Singapore followed suit.

Just next door in Indonesia, however, things are a bit more sensible. It has three time zones, correctly following the longitude breakdown. This has odd consequences if you’re travelling from Singapore to Indonesia. If you catch a boat and take a 45 minute trip to Bintan, then you have to put your watch BACK an hour. If you jump on a plane and fly for two hours to Bali, you find yourself in the same time zone! That’s just weird.

It gets worse. India for reasons best known to themselves, have adopted a time zone of GMT+5.5 Why the half? I think it might be curry related! Next door, Myanmar followed suit and set a time zone of GMT+6.5. Weirdness begets weirdness. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, Nepal has a time zone of GMT+5.45. Now there’s no way you can justify that as being sensible!

All this fiddling with time zones was a bit much for the Chinese. They decided to have one time zone, GMT+8 for the ENTIRE country! It’s a massive place. Based on longitude, it should have five time zones! As the sun rises at 7am in Beijing, in Xinjiang it’s also 7am, but the sun won’t come up for another three hours. How annoying must that be!

Just to make things fun, we can throw Daylight Saving into the mix. Daylight Saving is a good thing. The only problem is when it’s not consistently applied. In Australia, out of the seven states and territories, two of them don’t have Daylight Saving and one starts a month before the others. The end result is chaos. Tasmania and South Australia, I’m looking at you!

If you want to be a real geek, and who doesn’t, you can work out exactly when the sun is at its maximum point overhead. Every degree of longitude is four minutes time difference. If you live in Brisbane, the GMT+10 time zone is based on a longitude of 150°E, but Brisbane has a longitude of 154°E. This means, the sun is highest at not noon, but 16 minutes earlier – 11:44am. If that gets you excited, please seek professional help.

So there you have it. All you could ever want to know, and more, about time zones. Don’t you just feel so much more cleverer now? 