Though the idea is attractive and embodies some great practicalities, perhaps the greatest obstacle to the adoption of one worldwide timezone will be the inevitable, possibly intractable, fight over what, exactly, that time will be. Will
Midnight in Paris see the sun high in the sky? Will the
3:10 to Yuma be set in the pitch darkness of night? Will
High Noon occur at daybreak? What time would
Zero-Dark Thirty even be?
Given time (by which I mean a sufficient period of it), naturally, people would adjust. But it is the discomfort of launching into so radical a shift which would surely engender opposition. Let us suppose that, as with our
meridians, we were to deem
Greenwich Mean Time to be zero-hour, if it was midnight in Paris, it would be, well, midnight everywhere else, from
San Francisco to
Sydney, from
Tacoma to
Tokyo. But 2 AM in Tokyo would see the sun at its highest point in the sky, and in
Reno it would come around sunset.
Travelers might find this inconstancy of the clocks equally disturbing. The person who has come from
Berlin to
New Orleans might be surprised to find that, whereas they are accustomed to going to sleep at 1 AM, the local time for this is 4 in the afternoon!! No longer could there be a universal convention of breakfast being served 'before eleven,' since 11 AM in Moscow would be well into the afternoon, and in
Beijing would be after sunset. Indeed, it would no longer make sense to use
midnight to refer to a time on the clock at all.
But, taking all of that as a given, it must be acknowledged that our assignment of numerical time to things is indeed arbitrary. Something to which we are conditioned solely by our existence in society, perhaps we can overcome it as readily as we learn in our travels to eat new foods and speak new words.