![]() (“Midnight” will come to seem a quaint word for the zero hour, where the sun still shines.) In Sydney, the sun will set around 7 a.m., but the Australians can handle it after all, their winter comes in June. New York (with its longitudinal companions) will be the place where people breakfast at noon, where the sun reaches its zenith around 4 p.m., and where people start dinner close to midnight. Every place will learn a new relationship with the hours. Some mental adjustment will be necessary at first. Only the numerals will change, and they have always been arbitrary. Our biological clocks can stay with the sun, as they have from the dawn of history. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. When it’s noon in Greenwich, Britain, let it be 12 everywhere. (though “earth time” might be less presumptuous). Let us all - wherever and whenever - live on what the world’s timekeepers call Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C. There are 39, crossing and overlapping, defying the sun, some offset by 30 minutes or even 45, and fluctuating on the whims of local satraps. Logically you might assume there are 24, one per hour. The time-zone map is a hodgepodge - a jigsaw puzzle by Dalí. We need to deep-six not just daylight saving time, but the whole jerry-rigged scheme of time zones that has ruled the world’s clocks for the last century and a half. Most people would be happy to dispense with this oddity of timekeeping, first imposed in Germany 100 years ago. Thanks to daylight saving time, we get a dose of jet lag without going anywhere. We will awaken Sunday to yet another disturbance in the chronosphere - our twice-yearly jolt from resetting the clocks, mechanical and biological.
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