Ever wondered why there are different times at different places? When it is daytime in New York, its night in Dubai and vice versa. Every country follows different times according to their locations. When you fly from East to West, one tends to gain time and in the reverse direction one loses time. If one has breakfast in London before boarding a supersonic flight to Washington, he / she can be in Washington at breakfast time again on the same day! Why do such things happen? This happens because of the Earth’s rotation which gives us day and night! As the earth turns, the sun appears to move across the sky. This apparent motion gives us day and night. A sundial uses the position of the sun in the sky to tell time. The time measured by a sundial is solar time. Solar time is 12 noon when the sun is on the (observer's local) meridian.
In order to efficiently use and measure time, everyone in the world would like to fix noon as the time at which the sun is at its highest point in the sky (i.e. when it is crossing the meridian). However, this seems to be impossible without the use of time zones. Since the Earth rotates at the rate of 15 degrees every hour, the sun is at its highest point in the sky at different times in the day for different countries around the globe. The idea behind time zones is that we can divide the world into 24 equal slices or zones, 15 degrees each, and adjust the clocks accordingly for each zone. We can thus preserve the need to fix noon as the time when the sun is highest in the sky for each country and yet also make it easy to understand times between different zones. The person who famously proposed this was Sir Sanford Fleming, a Scottish-born Canadian, in the late 19th century. Although well-received, this system could only be instituted worldwide in 1929, establishing arguably the most crucial system of the modern world.
To know more about World Time Zones you can enroll for this course.
Happy E-learning!
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