We Know More About Daylight Saving Time than Neil deGrasse Tyson

We Know More About Daylight Saving Time than Neil deGrasse Tyson

Nicole and Michael discuss seasonal time changes, time travel, and the prankster George Washington. This description may have been written in the future.

Daylight Saving Time – Timeline

  1. 1784 – George Washington wrote a  letter about conserving candle wax and waking people up with cannons and church bells. Washington wasn’t even suggesting the idea of Daylight Saving Time. All he was doing was making fun of the French and suggesting they were lazy and that they get out of bed earlier.
  2. 1895 – George Vernon Hudson an entomologist presented the idea to the Royal Society of New Zealand, he was mocked. He wanted more time in the summer to collect his bugs.
  3. 1916 – Daylight Saving Time didn’t officially begin until Germany established it in May as a way to conserve fuel during World War I. The rest of Europe came onboard shortly thereafter. 
  4. 1918 –  United States adopted daylight saving time for seven months during the WWI.
  5. President Woodrow Wilson wanted to keep daylight saving time after WWI ended, the country was mostly rural at the time and farmers objected, partly because it would mean they lost an hour of morning light. (It’s a myth that DST was instituted to help farmers.) And so daylight saving time was abolished until the next war brought it back.
  6. February 9, 1942 – At the start of WWII, President Franklin Roosevelt re-established daylight saving time year-round, calling it “War Time.”
  7. 1945 – a free-for-all system in which U.S. states and towns were given the choice of whether or not to observe DST led to chaos.
  8. 1966  Congress enacted the Uniform Time Act federal law meant that any state observing DST — and they didn’t have to jump on the DST bandwagon — had to follow a uniform protocol throughout the state in which daylight saving time would begin on the first Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October.
  9. 2005 – President Bush signs the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (reduce U.S. dependence on petroleum and improve air quality by addressing all aspects of energy supply and demand, including alternative fuels, renewable energy, and energy efficiency) into law. Part of the act will extend daylight-saving time starting in 2007, from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.
  10. 2007 – Daylight-saving time begins on Sunday, March 11 and ends on Sunday, November 4.

Time change facts:

  • Arizona and Hawaii do not participate 
  • Day Light Saving Time – no ’s’
  • Three supporters – Chamber of Commerce (people shop after work if it’s light), barbecue and golf industry
  • Politicians argue every year for a more consistent system of time keeping and can never come to a conclusion on how to adopt a permanent solution
  • One non-supporter – farmers because it confuses their animals and gives one less hour of daylight in the morning
  • 2 am and AmtrakTime changes at 2 am because of Amtrak there were actually no trains that left New York City at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. “Sunday morning at 2 a.m. was when they would interrupt the least amount of train travel around the country in 1918.

Time Travel Terms:

  1. Time dilation: is the slowing of the passage of time at high speeds. The faster the object moves, the greater the amount of time dilation. 
  2. Paradox: an apparent contradiction, or logical contradiction associated with the idea of time travel
  3. Grandfather paradox: if a person travels to a time before their grandfather had children, and kills him, it would make their own birth impossible.
  4. Bootstrap paradox: a hypothetical causal loop in time travel in which one event causes a second, which was actually the cause of the first.
  5. Fermi paradox: is the conflict between the lack of clear, obvious evidence for extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for their existence.
  6. twin paradox
  7. Casual Loop: a sequence of events is among the causes of another event, which is in turn among the causes of the first-mentioned event. Such causally looped events then exist in spacetime, but their origin cannot be determined.
  8. Fixed Time Travel: Everything that has happened, will happen because it has. Also, things that will happen, will happen regardless of your actions. This is the least dramatic of all time travel, because there is no way you can change the past or the future via your actions.
  9. Dynamic Time Travel: you have the power to control, and meddling with it could cause problems. If you go back in time, you can prevent something that has happened, but in doing so, you could cause the future to change, so much so that you might even prevent your own birth.
  10. Multiverse Time Travel: that every decision that is made in the world, splits reality into two parallel universes, wherein each of those decisions are made, and so there are infinite parallel universes, depending on every single combination of possibilities over all of time.

Rules of time travel in movies:

  1. Traveling in the future is easy – we are doing it right now
  2. Traveling into the past is difficult but not impossible
  3. Things that travel together, age together
  4. If something happened, it happened
  5. You cannot travel back to before the time machine was built unless you go to another universe
  6. Bring snacks and water

Time travel facts and trivia

  1. We live in a four dimensional world – length, width, height and time
  2. The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time — you age more slowly, in other words. 
  3. One of the key ideas in relativity is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — about 186,000 miles per second, or one light-year per year. 
  4. But you can get very close to it. If a spaceship were to fly at 99% of the speed of light, you’d see it travel a light-year of distance in just over a year of time.
  5. Astronauts travel fast (16,150 mph) so they age milliseconds slower than everyone else back on earth.
  6. We are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: one second per second.
  7. NASA’s space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.
  8. Stephen Hawking had a party for time travelers but did not send out invitations until after the party already happened – no one showed up.
  9. John Titor claims to be a time traveler from the year 2036. He was traveling back to the year 1975 to retrieve an IBM computer to save the world from a computer virus and stopped by in the year 2000 on the Internet to say hello and check in.

Time travel jokes and puns:

  1. If I had a DeLorean…I’d probably only drive it from time to time.
  2. I’m tempted to take up time travel, but I’m not sure there’s any future in it.
  3. I was going to tell a joke about time travel but nobody laughed.
  4. How can you tell when your clock is hungry? It goes back four seconds.
  5. Why should you never believe a clock? It’s usually second hand information.
  6. Q: Why do they pick the weekend for Daylight Saving Time changes?
    A: Because the other days are weak days.

 

Leave a Comment