A republication of a post first shown on 28th October, 2009 which still seems relevant as British Summer Time is due to end in a couple of days time.
oooOOOooo
An ancient idea may have run it’s course?
What is the purpose of “Daylight Saving”? [Interesting history of Daylight Saving on Wikipedia. Ed.]
This week we are in a particularly interesting situation as we are in the middle of a one week separation between the dates when Europe and US change their clocks back to “normal” winter time. I.e. Europe changed their clocks back at 2am last Sunday and most, but not all, US States change their clocks back at 2am this coming Sunday.
This is even more confusing than normal. But why are we doing this at all?
Is it to save fuel, to save lives, to save time or to save something else?
In my humble opinion it is all nonsense!
“Time management” is a myth
Time is time! People say that they do not have enough time to do this or that, as if they have ways to make some more; and, of course, there is much talk about “time management”. Yet we all have the same amount of time and no amount of management will change that!
We are certainly able to manage the things that we try to fit into the available time. That is, we can manage tasks, effort and so on. But, in everyday (Newtonian rather than Einsteinian) regimes, time is an inelastic independent variable. Fiddling about with the clocks and trying to “manage time” have no effect on the stuff whatsoever. Let it be!
There must be a better way!
Yes, I know! Some people make claims of wasted daylight or of the dangers to schoolchildren walking to or from school in the dark. These are valid areas of concern. If adjusting the times of business operations or schooling helps to deal with them, then by all means do so. But, for goodness, let’s not pretend the time is different.
Learning from Dogs 
In the UK the most often-heard argument is that we should align our clocks with the rest of Europe. However, I am fairly certain that Europe is always 1 hour ahead of the UK so that would not solve anything other than make doing business with Europe easier. This, in my view, is not sufficient justification for permanently mis-aligning our clocks with the Sun (which ought to be at its highest point in the sky at noon everyday everywhere).
However, at the latitude at which London is, the shortest day of the year is 7h20m, whereas the longest is 16h40m. This means that if clocks remained at GMT/UTC all year, summer and winter solstice sunrises would be at 0340 and 0820 hours respectively. Therefore, the reason we put our clocks forward in the summer is to lessen the amount of the year when the sunrise occurs ludicrously early… Clearly, the problem here is our modern insistence of doing everything with reference to clocks: It would be a lot easier if we just went to sleep when it got dark (and in the winter that would probably mean having two sleeps with a break in between)… However, getting back to reality, I can see no practical benefit to not putting the clocks back and forward: Especially since some people in the UK live much further north – where the annual variation in day length is even greater – so the effects of not putting the clocks back and forth would be even worse for them.
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My tuppence:
in the early days of steam, each town in the UK had its own time. Trains would leave a station according to the local time, which could differ from the time in adjacent towns by several minutes (or more, if a town’s clock was simply wrong!). As commercial connections between towns became ever more important, it was decided to adopt a single time that would cover the whole of the British Isles. The world had shrunk.
Well, the world has shrunk again; and if the British Empire still held sway, I’ve no doubt that the world would now run on ‘Universal Time’ (UT). So what if, on one side of the planet, daybreak would be at, say, 19:18hrs? The numbers are all arbitrary anyway. The main advantage would be that communication would be much simpler; none of this messing about with conversions to local time and the inevitable misunderstandings that result. Archaic, that’s what it is.
Oh, sorry, you were talking about daylight savings time, which is a separate issue. Well, I only have one thing to say about that: lighterlater.org.
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PS just noticed that your website claims I penned the above at ‘October 27, 2012 at 08:03’. My clock now reads ’16:05′, so one of us is wrong. Confused? So am I. ‘Nuff said.
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I think it is you that is indeed confused! You are not commenting on Lack of Environment, you are commenting here on Learning from Dogs in AZ, which is GMT-7 (as is OR at the moment because OR Daylight Saving Time (DST) whereas AZ doesn’t)… Confusingly, DST in OR ends a week later than it just did in the UK, so next weekend OR and AZ will cease to be the same… If people are now more confused than ever, this may help: http://24timezones.com
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Duh.
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