Gretchen Baxter wrote: > Hi, > > I went to http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ > > I saw that it was 10:35 in New York but in Adelaide it was 1:05 PM and in > New Delhi 8:05. > > How can that be?
I take it the question really is why there are time zones which are not an integral number of hours offset from UTC ? I guess there is mostly two reasons for this, one of geography and one of politics. Let's look at India: The republic of India spans from approx 68 deg. east to 89 deg. east, somewhat more than a full time zone span. The start longitude for UTC+5 is at 60 east, UTC+6 at 75 east and UTC+7 at 90 east. There are good reasons for a country to have a single time zone (just think of trains, flights, tv broadcasts etc., but there are a lot of other reasons), but for India choosing an integral offset could be inconvenient as you want the solar day to coincide with the clock day as much as possible.. So they decided to go for UTC+5:30 as a working compromise. When you look at other examples, like Nepal and Venezuela, I think you will find that political reasons have been more important. Not going into details here, but I guess the honorable mr. Chavez found it important to be on "venezuelan time" instead of the atlantic standard time (or even worse, eastern time :) I suspect some of the same goes for Nepal (at UTC+05:45).. Indian standard time (UTC+05:30) would suit them just fine, but somehow having your very own time can be, eh, positive for national(istic) needs.. The other neighbour of Nepal, China, has taken another direction. China, spanning 50 degrees of latitude (more than 3 complete time zones), has chosen one common time zone. Interestingly enough, this is the Beijing time zone. Beijing is located in the eastern part of China, so the western regions of China observe noon at closer to 15:00 (that's 3pm for you USians). --Magne _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
