If you travelled around the earth so that you hit every time zone at noon, would time ever pass?

Answer 1

Of course time will continue to pass. The way we measure time, in hours or whatever, is arbitrary. Events would continue to occur on your journey marking the passage of time regardless of what the clock says. The situation would be the same as if you were in a room with a stopped clock. Just because the hour wasn't changing doesn't mean that time itself had stopped.

Answer 2

It's really a combination of the first two answers. Time does pass as you move, AND the clock jumps forward 24 hours when you cross the international dateline.

From a relativistic point of view, you need to consider the reference frame of the person who is moving. As you move around the planet, time is still passing WHERE YOU ARE, and you measure it from your own perspective instead of from the perspective of successive groups of people in the next time zone over.

Look at it from another angle: while you move from one time zone to the next, it does not stay noon while you travel- it may be noon when you enter it, but then it takes you some amount of time to get across the whole time zone.

In your scenario, you are travelling one time zone every hour, so it takes you an hour to get across. One-sixtieth of the way across, it's 12:01, then 12:02- the clock is not frozen at noon. Then, just as it hits 12:59:59, you step across the border and instead of 1:00, it's back to noon again. Subjectively, you have lived for one hour, despite your clock, reset for the new time zone, showing that it's still noon. Crossing the international date line is no different, in your subjective time frame, than any other border, but your clock, which is being reset to match the people in that time zone once again, skips forward a whole day, to noon the next day.

You could keep going forever, with a clock going up from 12:00 to 12:59:59, reseting, and never reaching 1:00, but the days will change. Basically the answer is that yes, time will pass.

Answer 3

The International dateline is there to correct that seeming anomaly.

My partner actually celebrated her birthday twice on succeeding days when we travelled from New Zealand to Los Angeles. We flew across the dateline so we went back a day, and she had her birthday to look forward to again next day.

Of course, we did not go back in time. The time zones are an artifact, invented so we all have a daylight that reasonably dissects noon and our night reasonably dissects midnight. because it is an artifact, it needs a correction - that is what the dateline is for.

Answer 4

Travelling round the time zones would not affect the passing of time. If you took a clock with you it would show almost the same passing of time as if you stayed still, unless you adjusted it. I say almost as there would be minute relativistic effects.

Answer 5

Constantly time for lunch, perfect!

You've got to keep jogging along to keep up with the Earth's rotation, but if you go to a high enough latitude you can make that as easy as you like (as the distance you travel will be proportional to the cosine of your latitude).

The germ of an idea for a new chain of restaurants?

Answer 6

The only thing that would keep time from passing is if you were traveling at the speed of light.

Answer 7

Yes. Although,as you approach the speed of light, time would slow.But you wouldn't notice it.If you could travel at a speed infinitely close to the speed of light,say to the star closest to ours,then travel back, it would take what to you would seem to be eight years.When you got back,much more time would have passed here on Earth.This has been called time dilation.

Answer 8

Yes it would...you'd reach the point (travelling west)somewhere in the Pacific where you'd stop being behind GMT and consequently be ahead of it. Look at a time zone map.

Answer 9

Yes At the dateline 24 hrs will pass in a second

Answer 10

yes, after you had completed one circle of the earth and were back where you started, it would be 24 hours later, so a day would have passed.