h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"No Kea, you are missing BBS's point." - thank-you Mrs Zen.

Indeed what I was trying to get to is that:
- if you go with GMT all year, you miss early morning daylight in the summer.
- if you go with BST all year, you have very dark mornings in the winter, until gone 9am in the northern regions of the Isles.

Staying year round with one system doesn't give you a perfect solution whereas a clock change gets the best of both worlds.

But having read that linked article it seems like the darker mornings (all year BST) in winter might not be quite so bad, to go with permanent GMT +1. The world has moved on from when we last tried the experiment 40 years ago ...

Was that when they had 'Double Summer Time'? ie the clocks moved forward two hours? I can't remember what happened in the winter...

> if you go with GMT all year, you miss early morning daylight in the summer

Now I'm totally confused. I thought the point of BST was to move light from the morning, to make the evening light longer. I mean ... that's what's just happened, isn't it? So keeping GMT would give more early morning light in the summer but less evening light.

It's too hard!

Mol

Sorry ... poorly described ... I meant (because you are in bed) you miss early morning daylight in the summer (that could be tacked on in the evening).

Anyway however badly described the point that changing the clocks gives you the best of both worlds is the important part.

Do we need clock changes though? Couldn't employers be more flexible throughout the year on the hours they start and finish?

All I know is it plays havoc with my biorhythms.A gradual changeover to lighter mornings is one thing but artificially inducing it by changing the clocks in one fell swoop is another..I'm not sure just what it achieves when we all have access to lighting at work anyway..

Sanity in my case. Just as many peeps in this thread have bodies that are very likked to the 24 hour clock I am very sensitive to the amount of light there is around. I am intensely aware of the seasons. This may be partly because by preference I live in rural areas (is with little artificial lighting). This is also one of the reasons I prefer Northern climes - there is a greater seasonal variation both in terms of light and dark and in terms of flora and fauna.

With the advances in solar power technology, it will soon be possible to save all those unused hours of summer sunlight in a battery, and use them in winter, when they are not so naturally abundant; then we could spend the whole year on Battery Sunlight Time without the bi-annual argument.

I look forward to advances in high-temperature superconductors which will allow us to trade sunlight with the Southern hemisphere (Northern hemisphere centric thinking here), so minimising the problem globally. The outstanding decision to make then, will be which time-zone to adopt nationally.

I always leave my office clock on GMT. It lives in a case which was designed for a modem, and not a clock, and the twiddly button that moves the hands is hard to reach. I have no trouble at all remembering what the real time is, so I do wonder why we fiddle around so much with the clock faces.

We could always go with that idea of giant space based mirrors to give sunlight wherever on Earth we wanted it.

I find it difficult to credit that people are claiming their body clocks are being sent haywire, Just because they have walked round the house and altered a few clocks by 60 minutes ?