• Question: Who decided what the time is? Who said it was 12 pm?? How did they know??

    Asked by fi97 to Donna, Jo, Mark, Stuart, timcraggs on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Donna MacCallum

      Donna MacCallum answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      In 1884 there was a conference in Washington, DC that set up the world time zones that we still use today. These are all relative to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
      A day was divided up into 24 equal periods (hours) with 12 noon when the sun is at the highest point.

    • Photo: Joanna Buckley

      Joanna Buckley answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Hiya fi97!

      Someone once decided that we need a more rigid way of timing. About the times of the railways actually because you’d never know when your train was coming!

      They divided up the day into equal sections and noon is supposed to be when the sun is at it’s highest

    • Photo: Mark Lancaster

      Mark Lancaster answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Nobody did – there is no such thing as absolute time – space and time are linked and the passage of time depends on the observer and how fast the observer is moving. This is good old Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity – this http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/ is a good book on the subject of time.

    • Photo: Tim Craggs

      Tim Craggs answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi Fi,

      I think that humans have had a measure of time from the very earliest civilizations. However, time was only standardized quite recently in England, when people started to travel around the country more with the arrival of the railways. Before this each village had its own local time, set by the sun. 12 noon is when the sun is at its highest point (zenith) in the sky. I think this is how they knew.

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