Time is something that rules our lives,
but we hardly ever ask why it is what time it is.
Time, and how we manage it,
has been a surprisingly troublesome topic throughout history.
It's been a powerful political tool for governments,
and a form of protest for citizens.
And setting and changing time zones has sparked chaos and outrage over centuries.
Time even has a big influence on our health.
If you live in a place where the time zone is out of sync with the Sun,
it can hit your health and productivity hard,
and that's why some people think we should just scrap time zones altogether.
This is Professor Steve Hanke.
Hanke wants everyone in the world to look at their watches
and see exactly the same time,
no matter where they are in the world.
This is called Universal Coordinated Time.
It would mean dark or light, breakfast or dinner,
everybody in the whole world would see 7:00AM at the same time on their smartphone.
For this to work different areas would have their own local conventions.
Everyone would be on universal time, but the local custom,
when they opened the shops and everything,
would be geared towards where where the Sun was in the sky.
A working day may finish at 5PM UTC in London but 12:00PM UTC in New York.
All depending on where the Sun was in the sky.
Hanke thinks that since Universal Time is being used more and more,
it makes sense for the rest of the world to get with the programme.
in the past 100 years, new technologies have disrupted the relationship between space and time.
A phenomenon known as space-time compression.
Planes, space-travel and the internet all have one thing in common.
They allow us to travel and communicate long distances in a small amounts of time.
Using time zones would be a logistical nightmare.
As a result, pilots and astronauts use Universal Time.
Pilots use UTC so they don't crash into other planes coming from different countries,
Space has no time zone so the international space station uses UTC,
and even the internet uses its own form of Universal Time. UTC + 1.
As we've gone to things like internet, GPS and space stations and so forth,
the adoption of Universal Time is spontaneous and it is happening.
It all sounds pretty radical and it probably won't happen anytime soon
but Hanke's argument opens up some interesting questions.
Like how we manage time
and how our time management can fail us.
To work out why time zones go so wrong,
we need to look at how time zones came about in the first place.
Before the introduction of the mechanical clock, people told the time using sundials,
and even after clocks were invented people still set those clocks based on the Sun,
which meant the time varied slightly across short distances.
Noon in Oxford, for example, might be five past in London,
but since travel was so slow people barely noticed the difference.
That all changed when railways were established in the 1800s
and there was mass confusion over timetables.
To sort this out Greenwich Mean Time was adopted across Great Britain
by the Railway Clearing House in 1847,
and by almost all railway companies the following year.
Time zones came a little later.
Scottish-born engineer Sir Sandford Flemming thought of the idea
after he missed a train in Ireland in 1876.
Flemming's time zones split the world into 24 different time zones,
each separated by 15 degrees of longitude.
Skip to 200 years later and we have 38 time zones,
and they're not always logical.
Russia has 11 time zones while China only has one,
Nepal is the only place in the world set to quarter past the hour.
Having time zones also means powerful people can manipulate time to make important points.
Spain is one hour ahead of the UK,
even though the two countries are in line,
this is because dictator General Franco switched the clocks in 1941
as a gesture of solidarity with Hitler.
In 2015, North Korea decided to set its clocks half an hour behind South Korea,
to celebrate its independence in the 70th anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonialism.
But when relations with South Korea warmed in 2018,
North Korea shifted the clocks back.
Time was used as a political tool by British Colonials in India,
who thought clocks showcased their greater civilisation, productivity and discipline.
Time was a means through which the colonialist state
wanted to establish its temporal as well as political supremacy.
They introduced clock towers just after the 1857 revolt.
That was one way through which they wanted to tell the 'lazy' and 'backward' Indians
that 'here is the time that you need to learn'.
And these were imposing towers in the middle of the town. You could not escape it.
In 1906, thousands of Indians revolted against the British, who wanted to get
rid of local time in favour of Indian Standard Time.
To locals, it was seen as another attempt to crush tradition
and cement Britannia's rule.
But if all this makes timezones look bad,
things get even worse when you start switching time within those time zones.
Over 1.5 billion people in 70 countries
move their clocks forward when the days get longer,
and move them back when the days get shorter.
Moving the clocks forward is known as daylight saving time,
DST for short,
and put simply, DST isn't good for us.
After DST, the evenings suddenly become lighter,
and having to endure an extra hour of sunlight in the evening
isn't good for internal clocks,
AKA our circadian rhythm,
which is the natural internal system designed to
regulate feelings of sleepiness and wakefulness over a 24-hour period.
The thing is, we really have a complex set of biological rhythms.
Everything is tuned to a particular time of day,
you digest food best at a particular time of day,
Your immune system works best, you're strongest at a particular time of day.
If you mess that up, then there's a lot of
evidence that then that's related to obesity, type 2 diabetes and
cardiovascular disease.
When this suddenly exposed to more light in the evenings
the average American will sleep forty minutes less.
Studies have shown that more people have heart attacks,
traffic accidents and strokes in the period after the clocks change,
all due to disruption to our sleep.
There's quite strong evidence that the week after we've changed the clock
there are more heart attacks and there are more traffic
accidents, because people are sleepy following that weekend of loss of sleep.
Using using time zones also means lots of people always living out of sync
with solar time - the position of the Sun.
this is particularly bad for the health of people who live at the western borders of time zones.
One extreme example of this is in China, which only has one time zone.
If Sandford Fleming has his way China would have five,
but in 1949 the Communist Party introduced one time zone for the entire country.
This is known as Beijing time.
When the Sun is at its highest point in the sky over China's most Western point
locals look at their phones and see that it's 4:00PM,
but if they looked at a sundial it would really be 12PM,
and when the Sun sets in Shanghai at 7PM,
the Xinjiang local has another four hours left of sunlight.
This means they are permanently falling asleep later
but waking up at the same time,
because business hours are the same as the rest of the country.
Those with a later sunrise and sunset had worse health,
they earnt less than those living in the far east.
The same goes in India which only has one timezone.
It's been that way since 1950, three years after the country gained independence from Britain.
Despite the Sun rising and setting at different times,
everyone has to follow the same official working hours.
Children living in the west of India are more likely to be sleep deprived,
less likely to attend school, spend less time studying
and more time in sedentary leisure activities.
Studies find that people living on the western edges of US time zones experience higher rates
of breast cancer, obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Hanke believes the introduction of universal time at some point is inevitable,
but what would happen if we were to abolish time zones?
There's no question that introducing
one time zone for the entire world
would be a logistical nightmare.
Hanke compares it to switching from Fahrenheit to Celsius,
but temperature doesn't define our schedule the same way clock does,
and if locations did end up adopting their own time traditions,
we'd face exactly the same problems as in 1846.
So, while it's unlikely UTC will be implemented anytime soon,
time tinkerers and theorists can continue to dream of a simpler world.