What a clock up

So, tonight is the Night of the Lost Hour because the clocks go forward an hour. I’m seeing many moans about ‘losing an hour of my life’ and so on. You bunch of whining children. You aren’t losing anything and if you really believe you are, you’ll get it back in October anyway.

The clocks change. That’s all. Time is not changed in the slightest. People who don’t use clocks notice nothing at all. I don’t have to get up early tomorrow but if I did, and had to be somewhere by early clock-time, I’d have gone to bed earlier last night. I don’t so I’ll sleep the same amount of sleep I would have anyway and nothing will really change – other than the time on the clock when I get up.

I suppose, being retired and now self employed, clock-time doesn’t matter to me. I can work into the early hours and sleep all day and I rarely have to be anywhere by any set clock-time. If you work to set hours it’s different of course, but hey, going to sleep one hour earlier on a Saturday night isn’t such a big deal, now is it?

Time itself isn’t changed. You do not have one hour less of life. The earth does not stop rotating for an hour until your clocks catch up. Time does not come out of your clock. It does not care how we measure it nor even if we measure it at all. It just… is.

We don’t lose or gain time when the clocks change. Not so long ago, hardly anyone had clocks. I can recall being asked, often, why the people of old used ‘deosil’ and ‘widdershins’ instead of ‘clockwise’ and ‘anticlockwise’. Why didn’t they use the clock-based terms? The simple answer is, of course, that they didn’t have clocks and most had no idea what clocks were. They had to come up with their own words for rotational directions.

Time was measured, for them, by the passage of the sun across the sky and since they didn’t have electricity, they woke up when the sun was up and went to bed when it went down. Sure, they had candles, but burning them was a waste when they weren’t really needed. It’ll be light in the morning.

Sundials didn’t have the means to shift between summer and winter time. I think some modern ones do. Despite the amusing memes, Stonehenge wasn’t shifted to change for summer time. It’s a recent thing, and its history is a bit messy. But it does not affect time. It only affects when you get up in the morning and that isn’t governed by time. It never was and never will be. It’s governed by when someone else expects you to arrive at work. That’s all it is.

What your clock says isn’t time. Time is in the rotation of the earth and its orbit around ghte sun and that stays the same even if your clocks all stop.

There is an interesting theory linking time to gravity but I only have physics up to A level. If I can grasp what the theory is saying, I’ll post about it later. It seems to make sense though.

In the meantime, have a lie in. It’s Sunday.