I am a time traveler.
I had no need for a magic phone booth or flux capacitor, just the ability to think and decide for myself. Read about my journey so that you can join me the next time I go back to the future.
November 1, 2020
Time travel is real.
According to NASA, Einstein, and modern physicists everywhere it is happening all around us.
David Lewis, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, defined time travel as having occurred when the difference between an object’s arrival and departure times do not equal the duration of the journey itself. This occurs as satellites orbit the Earth in a phenomenon called time dilation.
And that was exactly like what happened to me!
It was a Sunday that began like any other. I slept in, cooked a hearty breakfast and tried to clean faster than the kids could make a mess. I headed into work for a couple hours while our youngest napped and agreed to be back by 3 pm to meet the HVAC repair company. I lost track of the time while I was at work and didn’t leave for home until almost 3 o’clock, but when I got there it was only 2:30! A trip that normally cost me almost half an hour had somehow gained me the same. Had I found a wormhole? How fast was I driving anyways? Did I just travel backwards in time?
According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, time dilation resulting from high orbital speeds aboard the International Space Station is what causes astronauts to age more slowly than they would if they were on Earth. Gravity also has the effect of slowing down time so theoretically a person at the outer edge of a black hole could experience millions of years passing on Earth in what would feel like only a moment to them. Since the speed at which time passes is relative to other factors it is hypothetically possible that, if my car acted as some sort of gravity well, time was passing at a slower rate inside my vehicle than for the world outside of it. The whole gravity well thing seemed pretty unlikely though and that would only slow down time, not move it in reverse.
Minkowski Spacetime was developed by a math professor of Einstein’s and describes time as a sort of fourth dimension. This geometric interpretation of special relativity merges time with the three spatial dimensions and theorizes that past, present, and future coexist on the same plane. Accordingly, someone who dies or hasn’t been born yet still exists, just is not currently in the same dimension of spacetime as those living in the present. Wormholes could potentially connect one point in spacetime to another and perhaps I had traveled through one.
I excitedly tried to explain what had happened to my wife who offered a more pragmatic theory. I forgot to turn my clock back.
Daylight Saving Time had ended and Americans in forty-eight states, acquiescing to directives from the Department of Transportation, had collectively turned their clocks back one hour.
I’m sure that many people don’t mind changing their clocks twice a year and view it only as a product of the changing seasons. I’m fairly certain that there are a great deal of people who are content to conform to popular trends and comply with irrational government mandates as well. I am not one of those people.
Parents of small children treat bedtime like going to war. We develop strategies with an end goal in mind but winning the nightly battle requires careful planning, flawless execution, and detached flexibility. A late package delivery, low flying airplane, bear in the trash, trucker riding his air brakes or overnight thunderstorm can devastate an otherwise impeccable routine that has taken months to establish. If we were going to mess with bedtime, there had better be a good reason.
The more I considered it the more difficult it became to uncover a sensible motive to screw with our circadian rhythms. What owning our own business lacks in security it makes up for in freedom and being able to set our own schedule had always been the best perk. Homeschooling also has its drawbacks but unlike distance learning could be done at our convenience. I knew there must have been a compelling justification for enacting Daylight Saving Time in the first place, so I started asking around but no one seemed to know what the real explanation was. Some people thought it had to do with farmers or something about Benjamin Franklin, others school transportation, but despite not having a clear explanation why, everyone I asked seemed perfectly content to comply. I was not and decided to do some research instead.
Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical essay in 1784 while staying in Paris when he was awakened early by the summer sun. In the essay he suggested the French could save millions of francs by using sunlight instead of candles if they woke up an hour earlier. Although often credited with inventing DST, Franklin was only jokingly proposing a change in sleep schedules which, ironically, makes much more sense anyways.
An entomologist from New Zealand, George Hudson, is actually credited with being the first to propose modern DST over a hundred years later in 1895. He suggested advancing the clock two hours during the summer because he had a daytime job at the post office that interfered with his insect collecting activities which were best accomplished at dusk. He was awarded several medals and awards by the Royal Society of New Zealand for his efforts in helping to pass their version of DST, the Summer-Time Act of 1927.
The first cities to implement Daylight Saving Time were Fort William and Port Arthur in Canada which together would eventually become known as Thunder Bay, Ontario. Archival records show that an amateur athlete named John Hewitson from Rossport had lobbied city council members to make the change so people would have more time to participate in outdoor activities. On March 30, 1908 both city councils voted to switch to Eastern Standard Time on May 1st of that year because it would be “beneficial to the community”. This worked well the first year with both cities moving their clocks back on November 1 but things got out of sync the following year when Port Arthur refused to fall back. The situation was rectified in 1910 when the Ontario government gave both cities permission to switch to Eastern Standard Time permanently.
Germany and Austria were the first countries to effectively begin saving daylight during the first World War under orders from the last German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm. They moved their clocks forward one hour in order to conserve fuel needed to produce electric power for the war effort. Britain and other European Nations followed suit and a similar plan was enacted in the United States for seven months in 1918 and 1919 known as the Calder Act. The plan proved very unpopular and was repealed by congressional overrides of President Wilson’s multiple vetoes. In October 1919 the same congress would also override Wilson’s veto of the Volstead Act which was legislation designed to enforce Prohibition.
FDR instituted “War Time”, year-round DST, during WWII from 1942 through 1945 despite strong opposition from the farming community. The stated purpose was to reduce power usage by factories and offices during the peak consumption hours of 5-7 pm and to “promote national security and defense.” There was no federal regulation of DST for the next 20 years and it got a little confusing.
The Interstate Commerce Commission transferred oversight of time zones and DST to the Department of Transportation upon its creation in 1966 under President Lyndon Johnson. This was widely viewed as a political move in response to a front page article from the New York Times which detailed a 35-mile stretch of highway between Ohio and West Virginia that necessitated seven separate clock adjustments.
Under pressure from the Arab Oil Embargo in 1973, President Richard Nixon instituted permanent DST for what was supposed to be a period of 2 years based on some questionable math. His Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act was repealed after he was impeached 8 months later and a compulsory National Bureau of Standards study from 1976 found no significant energy savings despite Tricky Dick’s personal guarantee to the contrary. This conclusion directly contradicted a 1975 study by the Department of Transportation which estimated daily power consumption during DST decreased by 0.5-1%.
An additional month of Daylight Saving Time was added to the calendar in 1986 and again in 2005. The United States now observes DST for eight months out of the year many feel it should be year round.
In 2006, the state of Indiana mandated DST for the first time since it was outlawed there by the General Assembly in 1949. A subsequent examination concluded the change resulted in additional energy costs to consumers of over 9 million dollars and incurred additional societal costs in the neighborhood of $5-7 million.
While the costs and benefits of Daylight Saving Time are ambiguous the advantages of being able to move through time at will are unmistakable. In all of my research on the subject I was unable to determine a compelling reason for our family to comply with DST guidelines. I could find no evidence of any legal penalties although in 1923 Connecticut farmers who were very much against DST passed a bill which provided for penalties of $100 fine or 10 days in prison for showing an altered clock.
Our cell phones and computers automatically adjusted to Eastern Standard Time on October 25, 2020. The clocks in our vehicles and on our appliances remained on what was now Atlantic Standard Time which was one hour ahead. We kept our family’s schedule the same using AST but kept track of everyone else’s by referencing our phones or computers. Bedtime, bath time and dinner time moved forward without a hitch although there was some confusion at first. Getting the parlance down was a challenge. Our time, their time, normal time, real time, we settled on referring to our time as AST and everyone else’s as DST (even though it was actually EST). Our daily schedule didn’t change at all, and we never missed a meeting or an appointment. We explained our decision to the babysitter and had her start showing up an hour earlier once the clocks were changed. Our bedtime routine was intact and none of us suffered any ill effects save the occasional snide remark from my older brother. That’s when the time traveling started.
We didn’t discover a magic wormhole that allowed us to travel through time, we found a loop hole. After putting the kids to bed, my wife and I like to relax on the couch for a bit. If neither of us falls asleep and one of the kids doesn’t wake up we’ll occasionally attempt to finish a movie or watch another show. On these nights it’s the glowing green digits on the microwave which will often alert us to the lateness of the evening and send us searching for the warm cocoon of our down blend comforters. If the clock said past 11 than it was time to head upstairs, but maybe it wasn’t that late. Maybe we shouldn’t look at the clock on the microwave, maybe we should look at my cell phone instead. As our gazes shifted to the clock on my phone, we instantly were transported back to EST. We would travel back to AST overnight by leaving my phone downstairs on the charger and wake up back where we started. Wormhole or loophole, we had learned how to time travel and began to take full advantage.
It wasn’t just our bedtime that we toyed with, anything on the calendar was fair game. If the alarm went off, but we were too tired to get up in the morning, we would just turn it off and go by a clock that better suited our disposition. If a meal time or other scheduled event was inconvenient, we would just push it back an hour. If the kids wanted to stay somewhere longer, I would just move the clock back. If I was fifteen minutes late for work, I could just shift my paradigm and arrive 45 minutes early. We used to be the family that was always late and were now usually the first to arrive. The only way I can describe it is that it was like we were banking an extra hour and keeping it at our disposal for whenever we felt like using it.
Daylight Saving Time legislation provides guidance that helps Americans sync their schedules across over 3000 miles and 4 different time zones. It is an integral component of coordinating transportation and infrastructure across the country. But just because everybody else is doing it doesn’t mean you have to as well.
Think for yourself. Make a choice. Become a Time Traveler.
I’ll see you in the future.
Jack of Words 