Time Difference

[cardboard]

Whenever you travel West (or is it East) you take an hour or so off your current time to account for time difference. So surely if you got in a really fast jet and flew all the way around the world in under 24 hours, you would arrive back where you started before you left. How's that work? My brain hurts

[rja211077]

when you cross the international date line (somewhere in the middle of the pacific) you lose/gain 24 hours immediately, depending on which way you're going. so no, it doesnae work like that.

[jakesi]

When I flew from Fiji to LA I crossed the date line and had two Saturday nights.IE left fiji sat 11.50pm arrived in LA Sat 2.00pm. Done my head in because i thought it was monday.

[Tractorboy]

The key thing to remember is that time does not actually exist. It is only a mechanism that has been developed to allow people to syncronise with eachother. The only way to theoretically time travel would be to travel faster than the speed of light.

[dawnI]

Ah thats where old Phileas Fogg got unstuck, if you think of the world as a sphere (which it is) and divide it into 24 different time zones each one being at 15 degrees (360/24 = 15) the greenwich meridian is point zero as you travel 15 degrees east 'time' moves forward one hour until you reack the 'the International dateline' which is at 180 degrees as you cross it you are no longer east of the greenwich meridian you are west of it meaning you dont move forward an hour you move back 24, because at that point you move from the plus 12 hours timezone to the minus 12 hours time zone, then as you contimue to move east you continue to ad on an hour as before moving to the minus 11 hour time zone minus 10 hour etc. until you get back to your original time zone 0 gmt. Okak so if it is midnight august eighth in Greenwich it is noon at the International dateline to the east of the dateline it is noon august eighth to the west it is noon august seventh, if you cross the dateline moving east to west move back a day if you cross west to east move forward a day Clear? In Around The World in Eighty Days Phileas Fogg forgot this and continued moving his watch forward one hour so when he arrived back in London after travelling eastwards around the globe he had moved his watch forward one hour twenty four times therfore losing a day meaning he actually went around the world in seventy nine days.