Poll of daylight saving time: Which kind of time do you think they should be?
Poll Results
1. Switching standard time and daylight saving time like they do now
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2. Switching standard time and daylight saving time, using different dates than they do now
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3. Permanent standard time
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4. Permanent daylight saving time
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5. Mean solar time
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6. Apparent solar time
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7. Only using UTC and not using time zones
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8. Something other than what is mentioned above.
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51 votes were cast.
🗳️
Mar 07 · 4 months ago · 👍 norayr, scops
19 Comments ↓
Who are they?
🐦 wasolili [...] · Mar 08 at 05:33:
i like permanent daylight saving because it means more daylight after I get off work
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
🦋 CarloMonte · Mar 08 at 07:36:
@wasolili: correct. from morning till late in the afternoon the time is allocated on most days for indoors work. the evenings are for getting outside buildings and we should make them count.
👻 mediocregopher [...] · Mar 08 at 09:13:
Chosen working hours are much more malleable than the agreed upon system of time for an entire country, so I wouldn't use that as the basis of decision making
🚀 clseibold · Mar 08 at 09:31:
You can have the shift just be 30 minutes rather than an hour. This gives a bit more daylight to the morning and a bit more to the afternoon. Aka. split the difference.
Biggest problem is making sure all of our software works correctly with this.
👻 darkghost · Mar 08 at 12:26:
Energy saved: 0 watt hours. The biggest contributor to energy usage has never been lighting. It has always been climate control for a living space. Air conditioning in particular is a huge energy sink that doesn't care what time it is.
🦋 CarloMonte · Mar 08 at 13:20:
@mediocregopher: you can chose your own working hours but not the opening hours of stores etc. they are not very flexible in some countries.
While everyone will laugh, when the Swatch @Beat time came out I kind of liked the idea of just having a single time for everything. None of the issues listed above have anything to do with clocks, it has to do with what you're doing during your awake time. If you want more time out of work when it is sunny go in early. Doesn't matter what the clock actually says.
Knowing what time to call someone in another country, i don't want to figure out your timezone and if you change for DST or not .
👻 darkghost · Mar 08 at 23:04:
Life was "slower" back when time was less accurate. In the mechanical clock days, maintenance, temperature, humidity all played a role in the accuracy of the timekeeping. And likewise you had a bunch of different clocks all set to slightly different time. Your wristwatch couldn't be as accurate as a large professionally maintained clock, such as that on a bank. (Though wristwatches benefited from having a more consistent temperature.)
🚀 clseibold · Mar 09 at 06:17:
Solar time is literally just more accurate time zones, but ok y'all.
Anyways, I never got the obsession with UTC. Like, yeah, it's just a time standard. People act like it's the best time standard there is. The whole world could just as easily use Julian Day numbers (like in Star Trek TOS) and that does the same job. There's also TAI and UT1. Why can't we use TAI? Why does it *have* to be UTC? Why not a different prime meridiam?
Anyways, I'm all for switching to apparent solar time, but that means we're still going to have time zones. We'll get rid of DST though! We'll also have to completely redo all software to actually calculate apparent solar time, which isn't particularly hard, but it's highly dependent on location and even altitude.
Sidenote: It's significantly more useful to know at what (approximate) time, and how long until, sunrise, noon, and sunset are than to have everyone on the same timezone. Because last time I checked people still like to be awake during daylight and asleep during night, so we should probably have a standard way of keeping track of daylight and night, lmao.
Like, someone from the other side of the world can give me a UTC number, and that literally tells me NOTHING about whether it's daytime or nighttime. But if they give me an apparent solar time or a timezone time like 6PM! THEN I actually know the approximate time of day where they are at and when they might be going to sleep! Who would have thunk that timezones actually tell us stuff!
Sidenote 2: Time is not a freaking human-made construct! Our *measurements* of time are human-made. Last time I checked objects were able to move and the universe was not static. So, please stop conflating the two.
That's just my 2 cents.
Not to mention that time should clearly be decimal.
A 2-digit decimal time is accurate to ~15min, which is good enough to make appointments and schedule human-time events.
I did not expect this thread would wind up here...
🚀 clseibold · Mar 10 at 02:26:
@HanzBrix No, leap years have nothing to do with time itself. I think you are conflating time with time measurement and human perception of time. Your two first sentences even switch from "time" to "our concept of time". Those are not the same thing. Time is the progression of events and changes, whereas our methods of measuring time (clocks and calendars) are human-constructs, and our perception of time is linear and possibly biological.
It is *impossible* for time to not exist unless you think that humans aren't perceiving reality and the universe is static.
Time is either a dimension (the fourth dimension in the theory of general relativity), or an emergent property of change. We cannot have movement and change without time, because *movement is time*. Our Universe is not static, it changes. That is time.
If we just had the spatial dimensions (length, width, height), then we have a *snapshot* of the universe. Nothing moves or changes in this snapshot. Once we add the temporal dimension, we have *multiple* snapshots of the universe on a fourth axis. So, we have three *spatial* dimensions and a fourth dimension that is time, the *temporal* dimension. This makes up *spacetime* in Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
We may experience time linearly, that doesn't mean time doesn't exist or that time is linear. Axes are not necessarily linear. But we also cannot say that there's no cause-and-effect in the Universe too. So clearly there is some ordering of the snapshots. That, too, is time.
However, while the snapshots implies a discrete axis, the standard in mainstream physics is a continuous scale. But there's also the Planck time scale that models time as discrete (where the "snapshots" become the smallest possible unit of time), but we don't yet have any empirical evidence to support it.
Our models of time are not time itself, rather they are an attempt to *explain* a real phenomenon - that is, change and movement (and causality or lack of causality). For example, we didn't know exactly what gravity was before it was discovered, that didn't mean it didn't exist, and that didn't mean we didn't understand that objects were being pulled down to the earth in some way.
Each dimension is made up of stacking objects from the dimension before it. For example, a line in the second dimension is made up of 1D points. You stack points into a line. You stack lines into a square, and you stack squares into a cube. If you stack cubes, then you get either a fourth spatial dimension, or if it's temporal, then we have a stack of different "snapshots" of the cube.
So a dynamic reality can also be static at a smaller scale. A 4-dimensional reality where the 4th dimension (axis) is time means that we might have a static 3-dimensional universe at any point along the 4th axis. A dynamic universe is also a static universe, and all points along the 4th axis could co-exist aside each other, hence a reality that can have a linear cause-and-effect can also be "non-linear" in a sense. The linearity of perception or measurement does not mean the underlying reality is also linear.
In this view, which is basically eternalism, our experience is just our perception of moving along the time axis (the 4th dimension). All "snapshots" of 3-dimensional space could all coexist at once, but the movement along the 4th axis is what gives us our linear perception of time.
Or you can alternatively view the time axis as a *growing* axis, where all of the past and present coexist, but the future *grows* as we move along the 4th dimension (time axis), creating new 3-dimensional "snapshots" of the universe.
If we were to instead take a presentist view of time, which I personally think is inconsistent with science in general, time still exists, it just becomes the continuous change of the present moment. Instead of a stack of 3-dimensional space "snapshots", we have one 3-dimensional space that exists as the present, with no past or future, but the present changes. In a presentist view, time is an *emergent* property of a changing present.
So it doesn't matter which way we think about this, time is always change and movement, no matter if it's linear, a DAG, completely malleable and unordered, or an emergent property of a changing present. Time clearly exists, because we experience multiple states of the universe.
Even if you want to say that time is just our perception of change and that change doesn't exist, which I think is philosophically unsound, our perceptions are not exactly "human-made".
While time itself exists independently of our measurements, we use these measurements to approximate time for practical purposes.
Leap Years are a way for us to sync up our measurement of time with the time it takes for the earth to make a revolution around the sun. They exist because this revolution is not 365 days. The revolution is 365.2422 for the Tropical Year, or 365.25636 for the Sidereal Year. Since our calendar is based on the Tropical Year, because we want to track seasons rather than full revolutions, we add a day every 4 years, excluding every 100 years, and a day every 400 years. This makes up for the 0.2422 days and puts us back into sync.
Additionally, we have leap seconds because a day is not perfectly 24 hours. Hours, seconds, days, and years are human-made *measurements* of time; they are not time itself.
Time cannot be "out of sync with the planets". Only certain *measurement* of the year are out of sync with the planets. The fact that the planets move is a *result* of time, of a changing universe.
Scientists use other measurements outside of the year so that they *are* able to get a correct syncing of the planets. That's how they are able to know when eclipses and all sorts of celestial events occur. It's not always perfect because it doesn't *need* to be perfect. Practicality and computer efficiency also matter.
There is a book called "astronomical algorithms" by Jean Meeus that you should look at. It explains that we have the ability to calculate things very accurately, but these calculations are not practical for *civil calendars*. We don't use leap years because we think they match up perfectly. We use them because they are **practical** and they have a history.
Julian Days are not actually practical on Earth. We use them for the ease of conversion between different calendar systems, and for celestial calculations. Leap years don’t prove that time itself is inconsistent; they simply show that our calendar system uses an approximation of Earth’s orbit.
🚀 clseibold · Mar 10 at 02:39:
@HanzBrix
We also cannot dismiss the possibility of other dimensions above time, although this is still very much theoretical. When we talk about parallel universes, or parallel timelines, those are other dimensions above the temporal dimension. Let us say we have a fork off of a time line. This fork is on a new axis - a *fifth* axis if you will. This will be our *fifth* dimension. We can have cause-and-effect between each snapshot/universe on the fifth dimension, and this creates our forks in timeline, because it implies an ordering to the universes on the fifth dimension.
If we are to say that the fourth dimension is temporal, then spacetime has four dimensions. If you *stack* multiple 4D spacetimes on a fifth axis, then you get a theoretical fifth dimension where each point along it represents a unique timeline of spacetime. If there's a causal relationship between these multiple spacetimes on the fifth dimension, then we have multiple timelines that branch off of each other.
We can actually model this by treating the 3 spatial dimensions as a single axis. We have space on the x axis, time on the y axis, and the fifth dimension would go on the z axis. We can go forward and backward across z at any point, and then go up the y axis, which moves time in that z plane (timeline).
The z-axis, in this model, is made up of multiple 2D planes, with each plane representing one distinct spacetime universe, a universe with 3 dimensions (which we compressed into our one x axis) and one temporal axis (the y axis).
You can also have multiple temporal dimensions, but this makes cause-and-effect more ambiguous, which might actually be a good thing if it matches the causal ambiguity of reality.
Our theories of spacetime also affect spirituality and Theology. These theories of spacetime do not inherently contradict spirituality and could provide new ways to understand theological concepts like free will and indeterminism. For example, our consciousness could exist inside or outside of the 4-dimensional spacetime continuum, and a growing or unfolding theory of the temporal dimension could explain free will and indeterminism. You can also have more spatial dimensions underneath the temporal dimension that exist alongside the 3 spatial dimensions that we perceive.
🚀 clseibold · Mar 10 at 03:15:
@HanzBrix I also need to stress that Einstein **never** said Time is an illusion. He said the distinction between the past, present, and future is an illusion. What he actually posited was that time is another dimension (a fourth dimension) that is intertwined with space and is relative to the observer.
And to finish up:
Each particle follows a predetermined path, based on its previous state, unless God Almighty is pumping pure randomness into the system from the outside.
And the sum total of these, what we refer to as 'our Universe', is therefore, completely deterministic. And so we shall live out our predetermined lives, without any free will (but thinking that we have it), along with the rest of the players of this Greek tragedy, predetermined by the rules of the system started up by some cosmic joker -- or a some natural process, if you prefer.
And at this point in time, we are supposed to complain about how we measure and label it in different parts of this planet. How boring.
👻 darkghost · Mar 10 at 09:43:
I don't believe in randomness. I believe in systems whose states aren't completely measured and/or understood.
Also I am tired because of the arbitrary labels of relativistic 4th dimensional units we have decided to base a society's synchronization on. I will complain because, biologically, I hate it.
🐦 wasolili [...] · Mar 11 at 03:13:
I propose a new time standard: Andrew WK Time, or AWKT for short. it's a very simple, intuitive system: it's always party time
The whole 'time is the fourth dimension' thing has been way overplayed, and never made that much sense to me.
It's certainly not like the other dimensions, as you are dragged through it in one direction by an unseen force, along with other things around you (but not necessarily at the same rates), and to make things worse, you deteriorate along the way. And pick up irreversible crap, until eventually everything turns into gray goo with a constant temperature.
Maybe it's a convenience to graph things, but man, if it is a dimension, it is a weird one.
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