Why is the time different around the Globe?

Question

just curious

Answer 1

Noon is where the sun is directly above (12 p.m.). Midnight is on the other side of the earth (12 a.m.) fill in the other hours proportionally based on location from sun.

Answer 2

Time is diffrent because the sun can only light up one half of the world at a time.

Answer 3

because even the people on the other side need to sleep

Answer 4

I will try to explain it this way...

First, you know that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the west because the Earth is really turning from the west to the east.  Also remember that lines of longitude go from the north to the south pole and that the 24 major lines of longitude are spaced 15 degrees apart around the entire sphere of the earth (24 x 15 degrees = 360 degrees).

Now imagine In New York City that it is 12:00 Noon and the sun is at it's hightest point for the day as the clock stikes.  At that moment, if you had a friend 15 degrees away in longitude to the west, for example in Chicago, you'd expect that it would take the Sun an extra hour for the earth to turn another 15 degrees so that the Sun would be at its highest point there because it takes the earth 1 hour to turn 15 degrees under the sun.  If you had another friend at that moment who lived in Denver, they'd have to wait two hours for the Sun to rise to its highest point in the sky because Denver is about 30 degrees of longitude west from NYC.

Since the earth turns 15 degrees in one hour, it takes 24 hours for it to turn all the way around once, to a point that the sun is in the same point in the sky. (One day)

Wouldn't it be crazy if 12:00 Noon meant that that the Sun was at it's highest point in New York City, but in Honolulu, Hawaii that the Sun wasn't even up yet?  It would be really confusing as to what 12:00 Noon meant.  Obviously, all of the people around the world expect that 12:00 Noon means that the Sun is at it's highest point - for them.

So the world was divided up into 24 "Time Zones" APPROXIMATELY 15 degrees acoss in longitude, starting at Greenwich, England, and going around the world.  There is also a line called "The International Date Line" which is where today becomes tomorrow (12:00 Midnight) about halfway around the world from Greenwich.  I said approximately, because there are plenty of cases where the politicians have drawn the timezone lines artificially to go around some piece of land that juts out into the next longitude, where a particular country wanted to be part of one time zone and not another, or some countries like Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Burma who have picked to be 1/2 hour off of everyone else in the world for some reason. :-)  The point is that the time zone lines are artificial; arbitrarily decided by politicians but try to match the earth's lines of Longitude to a close extent.

The whole point of time zones is so that the Sun rises about 6:00 am local time, is at it's highest at about 12:00 Noon local time and sets about 6:00 pm local time on average, for each location on the Earth.

I have included Wikipedia references that will explain more, but if you want a surprisingly fascinating, well written account of how all of this was first envisioned and implemented, you might want to read Dava Sobel's excellent short book called "Longitude".

Answer 5

the time is different around the globe because of the way the earth is tilted. scientists created something called the international date line, which is in the center of the world (0 degrees longitude) where the time is 0:00GMT then for the more west you go from there the time decreases by 1 hour after every few hundred kms (e.g -1:00, -2:00.) and the more east you go the time increase by one hour each few hundred kms  (e.g +1:00, +2:00)