Having just switched again to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the U.S., it’s a good opportunity for me to express my misgivings on the matter. I’m not going to delve into the history or motivations: that’s what Wikipedia is for. The main take-away will be what it says about—and does to—our perceived relationship to the world.

The parents of my friend from Puerto Rico nailed it. He had moved to Rhode Island for college, and called them every week at a certain time. A few months in, he warned them that next week he’d be calling an hour later than normal (as they would perceive it) due to the time change. “What kind of arbitrary shenanigan is that?! You can’t go around just changing the clocks! Balderdash!” I’m sure that’s the exact translation from Spanish. In any case, I’m in total agreement!

The Phenomenon

Noon is loosely defined as the middle of the day, when the sun is at its zenith—crossing the north–south meridian. This was the cardinal moment of the maritime day, when sextants marked the apex of the sun’s daily journey across the sky and hourglasses were reset accordingly: eight bells; change of watch (not wristwatch, in this case). By comparing local noon to an accurate chronometer (clock)—set to Greenwhich time, for instance—one could ascertain longitude on the planet, which transformed navigation and quelled many anxieties about being blown onto a lee shore in the dark of night.

For every degree of longitude one travels west, noon happens 4 minutes later. If each locality set its clocks in the nautical fashion, Philadelphia would be almost five minutes behind New York City. Every place would have its own time, which may be fine for isolated ships at sea but it’s no way to run modernity and schedule zoom calls!

Thus, we define time zones, nominally centered at integer multiples of 15° in longitude. This puts Philadelphia (75°W) right in the center of Eastern time, Memphis (90°W) at the center of Central, Denver (105°W) squarely in Mountain, and Fresno (120°W) sitting atop Pacific. Boundaries would then be 7.5°away from center, so that one is never more than 30 minutes out of whack compared to local noon (although the eccentric, tilted Earth throws in an additional quarter-hour periodic variation, as captured by the equation of time). The actual lines are politically-influenced to deviate, following state lines and the like. Chattanooga, where I grew up, sits at 85°W and by all rights should be in Central. But it’s magnetically drawn to the influential Eastern time zone. (Incidentally, I had a friend who lived just west of the city and whose house was bisected by the time zone line. It was the place to be at New Year’s! In an odd rejection of arbitrary convention, they observed Eastern time throughout the entire house!) The “erroneous” placement of Chattanooga in Eastern meant that local noon was nominally around 12:40 in standard time.

When Daylight Savings Time is invoked, a region essentially hops east by 15°—pretending to be somewhere it’s not. In Chattanooga, noon was now around 1:40 PM. How’s that for perversion: almost two hours off reality! Arizona sensibly abstains from the craziness, so that California hops in its lap for the summer months. Maybe all the snowbirds leaving the state make room for California? Maybe rates are better in the sweltering Arizona summer? Also Hawaii—being tropical and thus experiencing much smaller length-of-day variation throughout the year—sees no benefit to lurching. Therefore, the time difference between California and its neighbors to the east and west keeps yo-yo-ing twice a year. Make it stop!

In any case, as a California-based astronomer often having dealings with observatories in both Arizona and Hawaii, this hopping model really helped me keep the time differences straight as I lurched with respect to these stable beacons of reason. “Remember: it’s summer, so I’m pretending to be in Arizona now and thus farther from Hawaii than I really am.”

We’ll Have More Daylight!

Presumably, most people have heard—if not said—that once the time changes in spring, we’ll have an hour more daylight. Now, I hope most people who say this know full well that it is not literally true.

The day following a time change is not perceptibly longer than the one before: maybe a few minutes, but absolutely not an hour!. Yes: the length of day gradually grows as one approaches summer, ultimately resulting in markedly longer days than in winter (especially far from the equator). This would be true even without any labels on time. It was true 5 million years ago, before any humans walked the Earth, and it’s true today for plants and animals lacking clocks and watches. But that’s not what most people mean when they say we’ll suddenly have an extra hour of daylight. I’ll bet some really think it’s true, though, and what does this say?

Translation

My translation: the time of evening we now call 6 PM will tomorrow be called 7 PM. We’re just going to change the labeling. Nothing substantive changes about the day. If the birds, trees, raccoons, and newts notice anything, it’s that the day is maybe a few minutes longer as Earth’s tilted axis swings incrementally more toward the sun. The astute critter may notice humans suddenly beginning their activities an hour earlier than usual, inexplicably. What strange creatures!

Seasonal Allergies

I recently heard someone griping about having allergies in winter, when nothing was even in bloom. They went on to speculate that maybe there were enough plantings of southern-hemisphere species in the area to create the effect. It took me a moment of silent thought to apprehend the premise. It would seem the idea was that since our fall/winter is spring/summer in the southern hemisphere, plants from there would be in bloom during our cold seasons.

Kudos for that awareness, but think about the underlying presumption: that calendar labels matter most. A southern hemisphere plant knows to bloom in the (natively warm) month called December. By this thinking, bring it to the north and it continues to faithfully follow its programming and bloom when the calendar on the wall says December: damn the cold!

It seems obvious to me that a plant—carrying regulatory genes many millions of years old—has no notion of our recent artificial labels. But the plant knows weather and seasons. It knows moisture, temperature, the perils of freezing, insect schedules, fungal network operations, and a host of other factors we are not accustomed to considering.

This case stood out to me as another example of how our labels become the reality; the map becomes the territory; the theory becomes truth.

What It Says

To me, the phenomenon of saying that it will stay light later after switching to DST points to an overly-rigid, literal relationship with our artificial constructs. It favors theory over reality. We say the emperor has clothes, so he must, because: words.

I consider the DST reaction to be a relevant window into the wider phenomenon of modernity. We believe we make the world what it is from our meat-brains, when it should be clear that the world made our meat-brains instead. Students often would ask me who invented things like energy, or atoms, or any number of physical realities predating humans by billions of years. We create nations by drawing an imaginary line—sometimes across open water. We create money as a theoretical construct (a fiction), and allow it to determine most of the big decisions in our lives. We get up when the clock says 7:00:00 and angrily beeps at us—not when we’re rested and/or sense daylight. It’s a post-truth, post-factual world (post-modernist dreck): things are what we say they are, and even physics becomes a construct of privileged authority, rather than the bedrock upon which everything (even thought) is dependent. To me, it belies an underlying foundation of human supremacy.

Elimination Proposals

Chatter about eliminating Daylight Savings Time has increased of late. The disruptive Trump administration might actually do so. But it is completely unclear whether they would abolish DST or make it permanent! How much faith do I have that they’ll get it right, by my standards? Also, note that many health and safety organizations strongly advocate for standard time. Permanent DST would result in dangerous dark morning commutes to work and school. Where I live now, mid-winter sunrise would be pushed to after 9 AM, completely artificially and unnecessarily.

I’ll say this. If left to popular opinion, we would probably lock in DST (make it permanent), because people have a fondness for the “longer evenings.” What they’re really saying, without awareness, is: “I like summer better than winter.” They’re conflating natural seasonal change with clock changes. It’s back to the sort of sentiment: we make summer because we were clever enough to introduce DST, and now have created longer days. I guarantee you that if popular (ignorant) opinion prevailed and we locked in DST, the proponents would scream bloody murder when the first winter rolled along and it was still quite dark at 8:30! But they may not believe it until experiencing it first hand. I’m just saying: we’d see massive buyers’ remorse. No one could have seen it coming, though, right?

Just Shift Schedules!

To highlight the mental disconnect of adhering to the “theory” (labels) and wrongly internalizing that the day has actually changed, consider this proposal. Adopt seasonal schedules. We’ll use St. Louis, MO as an example—centrally-situated as it is. At winter solstice, St. Louis experiences 9.5 hours of daylight, from about 7:15 to 4:45 (solar noon sensibly at 11:59). At summer solstice, it gets almost 15 hours of daylight, from just after 5:30 AM in DST to just before 8:30 PM (noon happening at 1:02 PM). Without DST, sunrise would be a little after 4:30 and sunset just before 7:30 PM (noon at 12:02, where it should be). [I often us this great tool for such explorations.]

Let’s say you work an 8-hour day. Maybe set your work schedule from 8 AM to 4 PM in winter, providing about an hour of light on either side. If carrying the same, rigid 8–4 schedule into summer, DST results in 2.5 hours of daylight before work and 4.5 hours after. On standard time (and a rigid schedule), it would be a symmetric 3.5 hours before and after. It’s the longer after-work daylight that people notice and enjoy. 4.5 hours is more fun than 3.5.

So, just make your summer work hours 7 AM to 3 PM! The result is exactly the same, without changing clocks and all the associated confusion. But really: accommodate to the seasons! Most people accommodate their wardrobe seasonally. They change habits around opening windows, eating outside, and a host of other things. How hard would it be, really, to carry winter hours and summer hours? One could even apply a national standard to the shift, so that “winter hours” and “summer hours” would have universal interpretation for those who elected to go along. But the shift would be in routines, not in a perverted mislabeling of time. Noon would always be (approximately) mid-day, and after-work daylight is a function of when you work. No more hassles changing clocks in the car, the thermostat, the wall clock, etc.

The point is: nature is not rigid. Seasons happen. We might consider gracefully bending with the seasons, rather than pretending that the universe lurches to our capricious definition of time.

Views: 440