Why do we have different timezones
Hey, what is the time now??
Why?? we are exploring the timezones right, need to know the exact time so that we can ensure there is no time difference in relaying the meaning from our end to yours.. Perplexing and Confusing at the same time, we are just joking here..
This thought about why there are different timezones might have come into the curious mind of your some where in the time line of your life.. haven't it?
Let's explore why they are different then.. If you haven't got the answer yet, you will probably get in now.
So we all know we live on planet Earth.. well big secret right.. So moving on with the big secret, the planet Earth has its rotation as well as revolution. Each rotation completed marks a day for us and each revolution marks an year.
Now the answer to why we have different time-zones lies in the concept of rotation and revolution.. Imagine a ball rotating around its own axis, point a flashlight to it. As the ball rotates you can see that some part of the ball is exposed to light and some part isn't. Also as the ball rotates the area of exposure of light changes accordingly.
Now substitute ball with planet Earth and flashlight with Sun. As planet Earth keeps rotating around its own axis, part of it receives the light from the sun while the rest doesn't. Also the intensity of the light will change as Earth continues to rotate.
So this is what we call as
- Sunrise [Low intensity of sun light with intensity increasing overtime]
- Afternoon [High intensity of sun light]
- Sunset [Low intensity of sun light with intensity decreasing overtime]
- Night [Absence of sun light]
So every region or area of earth experiences these phenomenon at different intervals of Earth's rotation. So if someone says in one area experiencing sunset says that it is 04:00 in the evening, someone in other place where its experiencing sunrise cannot say the same right???
This is why time-zones were introduced so as to maintain the sanctity as well as sanity of the time and the people at a particular place on earth.So how they came to be as they are today.
Well, it may be surprising for you to know but earlier people created time-zones for basically every town and every city. This created further problems in the late 1800s when railroads expansion came into picture. As every train station had a different time set for themselves, commuters or passengers travelling faced lots of confusion as to which time to follow and which not.
There was a time when it is said that the railway station had to make up with more than 100 time-zones. Coming to the fact how the time-zones were fixed, scientists started studying the Earth's rotation and came up with 24 division of earth.
How??
Well when scientists saw that for every interval of 60 minutes there was a turn of 15 degree in the Earth's rotation cycle. They used this to chalk out 24 timezones.. 15*24 = 360 so considering the same.
So longitude wise every time-zone is 15 degrees apart. The zeroth point for the longitude line passed through Greenwich which is why Greewich Mean Time came into picture which was considered as standard for setting time across the countries. Although now UTC or Co-ordinated Universal Time is more considered. Let's not confuse UTC with GMT although they are used quite interchangeably.
Although this standard is adopted by most of the countries and geographies, there are still some who prefer a different standard than this .
For example India adds an increment of almost half an hour w.r.t the UTC. So for India it is generally GMT + 05:30, Nepal has GMT + 05:45, Venenzuela goes - 04:30.
China being so wide and vast in terms of area still follows only one time zone throughout the country.
There is concept of daylight savings as well which was introduced in some geographies to better utilize the sun light.
We do need to understand that time-zones serve as a reference point for the world to look at time. There is a further concept of what is time, how gravity influences it and what not.. That for some other time..
Well that's about what the curious mind asked today.. Until next time, remember the curiosity talks!!
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