Who Officially Decides What Time It Is?

well it's december 31st which means that today is the statistically deadliest day of the year as my family insists i call it new year's eve all around the world those of us who survived will be counting down the minutes and seconds until a completely arbitrary moment we've all collectively agreed is midnight but that got me thinking who decides that that moment is midnight and not say three seconds earlier or half a millisecond later and how do they keep the entire world in perfect sync well time as we know it actually started on october 22nd 1884 and because that sentence sounds like the opening of a particularly awful episode of the twilight zone let me back up a little bit for most of human history timekeeping wasn't standardized at all in fact it wasn't even tracked in any sort of consistent or precise way telling an early medieval peasant that you wasted quote four minutes and 25 seconds of your life watching a quote stupid video about timekeeping because you quote unsubscribe from half as interesting would have confused them for every reason but especially because of the idea that your day could be broken into minutes and seconds hours weren't even invented until the 13th century and seconds didn't catch on until hundreds of years after that but even after we popularized mechanical clocks during the renaissance there was still a second problem those clocks didn't always line up if your pocket watch was a few minutes ahead of your friend's pocket watch it was hard to know whose watch was more right some people managed to turn this confusion into a business like a 19th century english woman named ruth belleville who made her living selling people the correct time and if that sounds stupid to you just wait until jeff bezos buys up all the world's clocks and launches a service called prime time with no official way to standardize time there also weren't any formal time zones this wasn't a big deal for most people since communication and transportation were so slow that you couldn't really interact with people who would be in a different time zone anyway if you were living in yield london you didn't need to know what time it was in berlin just like how you the viewer don't need to know what time it is in places like jupiter or rhode island time was a local thing with towns or companies setting the time for people nearby but as trains became more common and going from one town to another didn't take 16 days and three amputations having a hundred tiny time zones along your train route became to use an industry term very very annoying here's a table of east coast time zones in 1857. when it was noon in dc it was 12012 in baltimore 1208 in philly and 12 12 in new york if this is already giving you a headache just try to imagine feeling that all the time plus whatever it feels like to have cholera and boom that's what being a 19th century train conductor was like eventually the railroads at least in america got so fed up that they said hey guys guess what we control time now and broke the us and canada into five time zones not wanting to be upstaged by a bunch of professional train geeks u.s president chester a arthur said wait a minute i'm the gosh darn president of the united states gosh darn it i should be the one who decides what gosh darn time it is and so he summoned an international conference of 26 countries specifically these ones to finally create standardized time zones across the globe the only question was where should the time zones start at the time maps use lots of different reference lines for their meridian like paris cadiz oslo and even the canary islands but a sizable majority used the royal observatory in greenwich england so that's ultimately what they voted for on october 22nd 1884 the world was put on greenwich mean time with 24 time zones in one hour deviations from whatever the clock said at the royal observatory and of course all the countries in the world joined hands and said great we love england they're our best friends in the whole world and have never tried to kill everyone in our country for some nutmeg let's totally schedule our daily lives around one of their clocks but plot twist that didn't happen at all it actually took years for greenwich mean time to be accepted internationally france stayed 9 minutes and 21 seconds ahead until 1911. ireland stayed 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind until 1916 and some countries still use non-standard time zones to this very day nepal stays 45 minutes ahead opting to base their time around the sun's position over this mountain venezuela has moved their time backwards and forwards a half hour for energy related reasons and china raised four of their five time zones as an epic prank on the region of xinjiang so one answer to the question of who decides what time it is is countries because countries have guns and clocks don't but assuming you live in a country that cave to those british time fascists and adopted greenwich meantime is the time on your phone or laptop or fancy toaster still based on the sun's position in greenwich well no not technically and that's because in the 1960s greenwich meantime got phased out for coordinated universal time which is effectively the same as greenwich meantime but with a little hand on it that says science you see as the world began to use things like gps satellites that require time measurements down to the billionths of a second the royal observatory's royal observations just wouldn't cut it anymore instead the coordinated universal time is tracked with an atomic clock which i do a pretty bad job of explaining in this video if you want a pretty bad explanation of atomic clocks but the basic idea is they're very accurate and consistent and use atoms so which atomic clock is coordinated universal time based on well it's actually calculated using a weighted average of more than 400 atomic clocks in laboratories around the world plus or minus a few leap seconds which i also explained in that last video all of this is organized by the international telecommunications union part of the united nations based in geneva so that's your culprit folks the people who technically decide what time it is a relatively unknown group of swiss people who work for the u.n of course the impending new year means now's the season when people arbitrarily use the fourth digit taking over to motivate themselves into improving themselves but of course it rarely works the problem is that people try to motivate themselves to do something they don't want to do rather than making time for something they enjoy that also works as self-improvement simultaneously that's why i think brilliance is so great i find their courses super interesting engaging an enjoyable way to pass free time a lot of the reason that is is because brilliance helps me learn stem concepts that i just could not grasp in high school i was notoriously bad at math but i can finally start to grasp calculus thanks to 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Channel: Half as Interesting

Views: 610,266

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Id: rSnprWNwD8k

Length: 6min 32sec (392 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 31 2021