There is a plan afoot in Europe to do away with the annual switches between standard time and summer time (or daylight-saving time, as it is known in North America).
Tonight in Bristol (at about 51° latitude) the Sun will set at 9:08 pm and on the June solstice it will be daylight until 9:31 pm. I think most would agree that it would be crazy to give up these long, bright evenings – so I’m hoping that, if the UK does stop changing its clocks, it will remain on summer time all year round.
The downside to being on summer time all year round is that it would not be light until 9:13 am in Bristol on December 21 if the UK remained on summer time. This worries some because it would mean that children would have walk to school in the dark for much of the winter.
José María Martín-Olalla is a physicist based in Spain who has devoted much thought to the effects of changing clocks. Perhaps this is because Spain is effectively always on summer time (or indeed double summer time at the moment). This is because despite being at roughly the same longitude as Britain and Ireland, Spain keeps the same time as its more easterly continental neighbours.
In the above video Martín-Olalla, looks at how sunrise and sunset times affect sleep patterns at different locations around the world.
The development of the kinetic theory of gases in the 19th century was a triumph of physics that has sadly been forgotten – in part because it was quickly followed by relativity and the quantum revolution. That is the gist of the latest episode of the BBC’s In Our Time radio programme, which looks back on how physicists and chemists managed to get a handle on the physics of huge numbers of molecules whizzing around in a gas.
You can listen to the discussion here.
