Should Britain be allowed to hold the monopoly on GMT?
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There was a need to set a single point for time measurement from a single geographical longitude so everyone could talk about time-zones correctly. If we moved the meridian then it could create great confusion because no one would know if we were talking about a previous time or a new time. Of course if any country felt so nationalistic they could stop referencing to UTC and define their own time, but it might confuse trade and other countries would still talk about this renegade countries timezone as being relative to UTC so they wouldn't win much.
Another example of this is why do we talk about dates relative to the Catholic Christian calendar? Some countries or peoples don't always follow it, but in commerce we still generally use the common Christian calendar for global coordination even if only 28% of the world is Christian.
The choice of 'GMT' was really a result of the 'International Meridian Conference' held in Washington in 1884. There was no universal standard either on time or on how meridiens should be counted (or where it should start). If you are interested, read the Wikipedia article [International Meridian Conference] and the proceedings [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1...]. (A relative of mine, the Swedish minister in Washington, Count Lewenhaupt, acted as chairman).
In 1882 the United States Congress directed President Chester A. Arthur to inquire of the world about the desirability of creating an international agreement on time and longitude. In 1883 the European geodetic conference endorsed the notion, and the US President issued an invitation to meet in Washington DC in 1884. The International Meridian Conference produced results which still have significant influence over the agreed notions of time.
The choice of the Greenwich meridien as zero was heavily influenced by the preponderance of Admiraly charts of the world. Any change would require a major re-issue of the charts, and of those charts based on the Admiralty charts, with a lot of confusion... Basically, most nations were for the Greenwich meridien. The French, naturally, were against it. Knowing they could not propose the Paris meridien as a world standard, they proposed what is now the international date line. This would have meant that the date line would be in the most populous areas of the world. Not a good idea. (The French did not accept the Greenwich meridien until 1911).
The acceptance of the zero meridien at Greenwich also - automatically - meant that Greenwich time became Zulu time, as the distance from Greenwich formed the basis for time differences. This was important, as the telegraph has became common, and messages between e.g. Washington and London had to be accurately time stamped.
GMT has now been replaced by UTC (sort of, in non-scientific usage we still use GMT. The difference between GMT and UT1 is never more than 1 second....)
Comparison chart
GMT versus UTC comparison chart
GMT UTC
Stands for Greenwich Mean Time Coordinated Universal Time
Refers To A Time Zone A System Of Time-Keeping
Usage By Human Readable Clocks By Digitally Synchronized Clocks
Measured Using Rotation Of Earth (Historically) Atomic Transition Principle
Let the Brits have GMT. Every empire deserves a gold watch upon retirement and a round of "for she's a jolly good empire."
Between that, the London financial sector, and exporting mean reality TV judges to America, the Brits should be able to make it safely through another mellow sunset century, with a few riots here and there.
If you do think it should be changed, the best thing you can do is to go out, find a suitable alternative and then post a written justification to the UK government.
If we agree that your reasoning is sound (and I find it highly unlikely that this will be the case) we'll put it to a national referendum.
Clearly, the aforementioned referendum will be laughed out of town and we'll carry on as we currently are, safe in the knowledge that, as masters of World time, this silly little mini-revolt has been stomped down, never to resurface.
Just to clarify Adisa, it's time that was invented in Greenwich, not timezones.
As for the idea of moving it yearly, I was working in the US when they decided to change the rules for when Daylight Savings Time (DST) would commence and end.
This created huge problems with all the applications that had been written using the old rules and all the machines had to be patched to use the new rules and so changing GMT would cause perpetual problems
Plus another problem in the US is that in some States multiple Timezones are in affect and so as DST sweeps across the nation one half of a State may be 2hrs ahead of the other size then other times , same time all through
This is bad enough but if each year we have to cater for different parts of the world being suddenly an hour ahead/behind because of the change in TZ would be painful to handle especially if the date was drifting Westwards putting in the neighboring TZ back into the previous year
Similarly on the other side of the world a move Westwards would mean some countries suddenly going back into yesterday
While we're at it I'm sick of this Gregorian calender nonsense, let's give all the other calendars a fair chance. We can decide that on New Year's eve as well.
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