Time wars
How a huge new clock in Mecca is reviving a century-old clash over what time it is
Photo by
'asyiqul^huur
By Adam Barrows
June 19, 2011
Last August, on the first day of Ramadan, the largest clock in the world began ticking for the first time. The Mecca Clock, designed to serve as the authoritative timepiece for the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims and positioned at the top of the world’s largest clock tower, poses not only an architectural challenge to England’s iconic Big Ben, but a political one as well. Defying the global agreement to consider Greenwich, England, the zero-point for measuring time and space — based on when the sun crosses over that meridian — the clock was constructed to run not on Greenwich Mean Time but on Mecca Time, with Mecca as prime meridian. This means that the Mecca Clock, and anyone who sets a watch by it, deviates from standard time by roughly 21 minutes.
To most of us, protesting Greenwich Mean Time (or its Greenwich-based modern successor, Universal Coordinated Time) may seem bizarre. Synchronizing every clock on earth to the minute offers innumerable advantages for global communication and travel, and most of us have become accustomed to the ease of moving our hour hands forward or backward based on time zones, which are in turn based on longitudinal distance from Greenwich. But in fact, consensus on world standard time isn’t much more than a century old — and was the subject of protest right from the beginning.
full article:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/id...ars/?page=full
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