Replies

One of the reasons Greenwich was selected in the late 19th century was that placing the Prime Meridian there, meant the International Dateline passed through the centre of the Pacific Ocean, rather than through a continental landmass.

Mecca would not meet this criteria - if it became the Prime Meridian, the Date line would pass through North America.

“meant the International Dateline passed through the centre of the Pacific Ocean, rather than through a continental landmass.”

Great point. I don’t think many people know that. I didn’t.

One of the reasons Greenwich was selected in the late 19th century was that placing the Prime Meridian there, meant the International Dateline passed through the centre of the Pacific Ocean, rather than through a continental landmass.

The Greenwich Meridan was settled on at the Washington Conference of 1885. The French, surprisingly, were advocates of the Paris Observatory as the reference. Failing this, they proposed that the reference meridan be selected such that it passed through no major land mass. The U.S. objected the reference meridan would need to be the location of a major astronomical observatory. There were a number of fine observatories at the time and all published excellent astronomical almanacs. However, as the U.S. delegation pointed out, 75% of all ships in international commerce used the Greenwich meridan. This was because HRM Greenwich Observatory published the best explanatory supplement to their almanac. In other words, it had the best users manual.

Time keeping and timescales are an involved topic. Current timescales are determined by cooperation among the standards bureaus of all the major developed countries of the world, which, I am sure, makes Muslims feel left out. I doubt that they will be doing anything much more sophisticated than installing a GPS receiver and offsetting its UTC output by a fixed amount to account for the difference in longitude between Greenwich and Mecca.

It is one thing to be second rate and another to be second rate and be painfully aware of it and yet another to be second rate and painfully aware of it and make a huge show of just how second rate you are. I've always maintained that a profound indication of insecurity of a country is when they offset their local clocks a fraction of part of an hour from Greenwich.

The Arabs are just upping the ante in the insecurity sweepstakes by offsetting their clocks to be 2 hours, 39 minutes and 18 seconds ahead of Greenwich.

There's a lot more to being a leader than buying toys.