wouldnt it be incorrect if time zones had jagged borders?

Question

say i lived in one city i drove south and i entered another time zone and instead of 4:00 it's 3:00. shouldnt they be straight. Because then they would be wrong,no?

Answer 1

A time zone is a political convenience. Technically every place should have it's own "noon," when the Sun is overhead. Any place east or west of you should have a different time. Prior to the 1800's, this was how time was set. One church or clock in town would be "zeroed" to noon and everyone else would set their clocks by it. At the Greenwich Observatory in London, they still drop a ball down a chute to signal to ships on the Thames the local noon.

Of course local noon in Greenwich is now Zulu Time.

Time zones were standardized with the advent of the railroad. There had to be some way to know what time a train would arrive and depart. Governments chose which time zones to be in, sometimes forming jagged lines. There are all sorts of oddities. In India, which straddles two time zones, it is always halfway between the two. When it should be 5:00 in the Western side and 6:00 in the Eastern side, the whole country is in 5:30. China has a single time zone, which leaves people in the west getting up at 10:00 am and having it still be quite dark out, because it is 10:00 in Beijing, and if you had a "locally set" clock, it would read 6:00 am.

Answer 2

The sun and time are not even. Due to the tilt of the earth's axis and the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, the length of a solar day is generally not 24 hours. Although on some particular day in a particular place the sun is on the meridian at noon, at other times of the year it it will be on the meridian as much as plus or minus 15 minutes. You can see this on a good globe. Look for a graph in the shape of a figure 8 called an analemma. It shows how the sun's noontime position varies throughout the year. It is also the reason why the earliest sunset in the northern hemisphere is around December 7th and the latest sunrise is around January 4th, not on December 21 which is the shortest day of the year. Astronomy can be a fascinating subject!

Answer 3

Some time zone lines are jagged. They "jag" to miss large cities. El Paso, Texas is an hour earlier than Juarez, Mexico which is further west because the two countries recognize different time zone lines. Correct is sort of a misnomer. To be exactly correct there would have to be an infinite number of time zones. To get the time to agree with the sun to within one second we would have to have 3600 time zones around the world.

Answer 4

time zones are artifical boundaries. they take into account state boundaries, city boundaries, etc. consider the time being set at the Greenwich mean (0 degrees) as you proceed west 1 degree, shouldn't the time be 12/180 hours earlier (a very messy 0.066... hrs or 4 minutes). times zones are drawn at approximately every 15 degrees and the "true time" is incorrect everywhere else.

Answer 5

Yes it's wrong. I wish they'd at least *try* to make them follow the right boundries, for example China needs several time zones, not one. They should still be on political borders for convenience but the borders picked shouldn't be so damn waaay off.

Answer 6

There is no "right" way to make the time zones. They are chosen for political as well as geographic reasons. For instance, look at the international date line and how it zig-zags in order to separate Alaska from Siberia.

Answer 7

Interstate commerece thrives on time zones. You are correct in your thought but that would not make sense for the sole purpose of making money and splitting up cable TV lines.

Answer 8

Ture.