Another Voice | 22 November 2008

Very long flights — flights like mine, to and from Australia, for instance — offer such an opportunity to think that you can tease a thought almost to the point of madness. What follows may read like that, and if you don’t wish to perform mental gymnastics on a nerdish pinhead until you’re intellectually giddy, quit now. But I’ve been turning over in my mind a recurrent problem in human reasoning that in real life irritates and trips us all, leading to endless misunderstandings — and I may have cracked it.

It’s the problem of time zones, and putting clocks ‘forward’ and ‘back’, and whether it’s ‘earlier’ or ‘later’ in Australia, and all the associated mental difficulty we encounter in putting into language clear to each other and to ourselves the way time is changed according to zone and season.

The short answer is that it isn’t. Time cannot be changed. Einstein and Relativity notwithstanding, for ordinary human purposes time — real time — doesn’t and cannot alter from one place to another. There is one time all over the globe and always has been, and we half know this and are half thinking, in this God’s-eye way, that now is now at the same time for me in England and you in Australia; and in a universal sense — in real time — nobody can be ahead of or behind anybody else.

But our human calibrations change, and we ‘move’ dates and engagements, and move through time zones, and we have never developed the language to describe this process without confusion. Because we can’t say it clearly we can’t think it clearly, and keep muddling ourselves up.

What follows is hardly definitive, but a start at least.