Zyra's site //// Concepts //// Time //// Libertarianism //// Science //// site index

WHAT TIME IS IT?

Governments can't control what time it really is. Don't be fooled by them!

One of the truths that is obvious is that a GOVERNMENT does not actually have any power over FACT in nature. It's no good a government legislating that 2+2=5 because it wouldn't make it any more true, and it would make the government look silly as it would have no credibility.

TIME is such a fact, controlled by the laws of physics.

The time that it actually IS, is a matter of astronomy and the workings of such things as caesium clocks. There is a time which it is by the ticking of high-precision clocks, and there's also the more obvious natural time which says that midnight, (mid-night) is the point in the middle of the night when it's the same number of hours and minutes to dawn as it is from dusk.

In Britain, there is the place called Greenwich where the world-famous measuring line called the Greenwich Meridian goes through. At that place, the time astronomers use, called "Universal Time" is the time it is, and so for convenience, the entire United Kingdom has a thing called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is a good approximation to the time the sun in the sky says it is just about anywhere in Britain within a few minutes.

However, halfway through the last century there was a terrible war and it was necessary to make people work harder, so someone had the bright idea of having a new kind of pretend time, in which everyone had their clocks moved forward an hour. Government decreed that the time would now be this new time, which of course didn't make any difference to the time it was, but it made people get up an hour earlier, go to work an hour earlier, go to bed an hour earlier. In times of war, such measures are a necessary hardship to endure.

But it's still on, just as surely as railings are not on places.

B.S.T., British Summer Time, or British Silly Time, is one of these things that people have fallen for, believing that's the time it really is. People who think they've got a nine-to-five job actually have to get up and go to work at eight o'clock in the morning.

In peacetime, if a government passed a law compelling everyone to get up an hour early and go to bed an hour early, civil rights campaigners would be outraged, and would call for a huge campaign of civil disobedience and the overthrow of such a dictatorial regime.

Admittedly it could be worse, for example the government could have made it law to keep BRITISH SUMMER TEMPERATURE, (BST) which compelled people to adjust their thermometers and thermostats and pretend it's five degrees warmer in winter and five degrees cooler in summer, so as to save fuel expenses. They could also meddle with the official size of a gallon/litre so that cars are made to look more economical and petrol not so expensive.

I propose not only getting rid of British Silly Time, but also watching out for any other devious things which governments may attempt to enact to the detriment of reality.

To keep some balance, it's worth knowing that mine isn't the only view on this, and there are people who believe daylight saving time is a really good idea. Take a look at http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/c.html for example.

Meanwhile, to see some of the curious things I have explored where I think the normal view isn't right, see misconceptions.