A proposal to set the clock by the sun again
Tomorrow morning, pause for a moment when you wake. Is it light? And when you step outside at twelve o'clock that day, is the sun above you?
In the Netherlands it is not. In winter the sun reaches its highest point at 12:38, and in summer only at 13:38. Your clock has been saying for over an hour that the afternoon has begun while the sun is still climbing. In Spain the gap is wider: there the sun does not stand highest until 14:14 in summer, and in Morocco it was 13:34 until recently.
Nobody designed it this way. It grew this way.
Meridiae is a proposal to make something of it that holds true again. Noon when the sun stands highest, midnight when it stands exactly opposite. Every country and every state lives on the time that belongs to the position of the sun above its own geographic centre, rounded to whole hours, without summer time. That gives about three hundred and ten regions worldwide, each with a noon of its own that you can check with a stick in the ground.
The name comes from the Latin meridies, midday, and points at the same time to the meridian that decides that noon. Chronae measures the year and takes its bearings from the solstices. Meridiae measures the day.
The proposal now on the map
Two things sit differently here than in the world as it is.
The bands stand shifted by half a band. The fifteen-degree hour bands now have their boundaries on zero, fifteen and thirty degrees, rather than their centres. The zero point of the numbering lies at 157.5 degrees east, near Kamchatka, which is ten hours and thirty minutes further east than Greenwich.
The date line lies in the Atlantic Ocean, at thirty degrees west, on the boundary between two bands and straight through the emptiness between America and Europe.
That half band looks like a detail and does nearly all the work. Of those ten and a half hours, the ten whole hours are only a different number on the same band. The half band moves the boundaries themselves, and that changes who ends up sharing a time with whom.
What comes back
The first thing Meridiae does is let summer time go. For part of Europe that is the whole gain.
The second is that the sun returns to the middle of the day. In the Netherlands it then stands highest at 12:08, eight minutes after the clock, where it is thirty-eight minutes now and almost an hour and a half in summer. Ireland and Portugal come out at 12:02, Switzerland at 11:58, Morocco at 12:04. That is closer to reality than anywhere on the European mainland has ever stood.
The third is that neighbours come to stand together. Through the shifted boundaries, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Austria and Norway share the same time. Alongside them a western group forms of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Morocco, all of which lie on the same ocean and all of which kept the same time before the war.
The promise underneath is measurable. Rounding to whole hours keeps the deviation to half an hour at most, and within a wide region it rises to an hour. Nobody then lives further than an hour and a half from their own solar noon. That is the guarantee the present system gives nowhere.
What is restored
Going through the history, the same picture kept returning. Almost no country left its own solar time for astronomical reasons.
The Netherlands lived on Amsterdam Time until 1940, the mean solar time of the Westertoren in Amsterdam, nineteen minutes and thirty-two seconds ahead of Greenwich. Legal national time from 1 May 1909. On 16 May 1940 Berlin time was introduced, and it has never been left since. Belgium had GMT by law from 1892, France from 1911, Spain from 1901, and all three lost that time in the war years.
There is one country that used the reasoning of Meridiae exactly, in 1907. The Icelandic Althing chose a national time of its own, on the express ground that Reykjavík lies geographically within that band. A hundred and nineteen years ago, in a parliament.
What it changes between people
A difference in time carries information. When you call while the other is just waking, or while evening is already falling there, that says something real. The sun stands differently there. That person's body runs on another rhythm.
A clock that shows the difference honestly tells you something about the other that a uniform agreement hides. And from that follows something gentle of its own accord: you begin to take account. Of yourself, because you notice when your own rhythm asks for room. And of the other, because you know which phase they are living in. Together you then look for the moment that works for both.
Where is the true resonance. That question only reaches the table when the difference is visible.
The first concession: the whole hour
Meridiae gives nobody the sun exactly overhead.
The Netherlands comes out at 12:08, which is eight minutes. Austria and Norway sit twenty-six minutes away, and anyone living at the edge of a wide region can be an hour off. Even on the most accurate meridian a difference of up to sixteen minutes remains between the clock and the sundial, because the earth does not travel around the sun in a perfect circle.
That rounding is chosen on purpose. A shift of a whole hour you share with others without any aid, where eight minutes turns every appointment across a border into a sum. What you give up is exactness, and that is a real loss.
The second concession: the ocean between us becomes a date line
Somewhere on earth the date jumps. That is no choice of Meridiae, it is a property of a sphere on which people count days. Walk around the earth with the sun and you come out a day short. The count therefore jumps somewhere, and where that happens people decide for themselves.
In this proposal it happens in the Atlantic Ocean, and that is felt. When it is Monday midday in the Netherlands, it is Tuesday morning at seven in New York. Europe and America then stand on different dates throughout the European working day, and that touches the millions of households with loved ones on the other side.
This place is chosen on purpose. A seam you never meet lets you forget that a seam exists. A seam in the middle of the busiest crossing in the world is visible every day, and says the same thing at every encounter: the date is something we keep.
At thirty degrees west the line touches almost nothing. Iceland stays whole and keeps the European day. The only country it crosses is Greenland, where the east coast comes to lie with Europe and the west coast with America.
That is no accident, and it is an offer. A country with two dates has a boundary you can cross. Anyone travelling from Nuuk to Ittoqqortoormiit at the right moment celebrates Consteiadag twice. Anyone going the other way drops a day and knows exactly why. Greenland decides for itself whether to carry that or rather stay on one side, because the seam follows zone boundaries and the people who live there decide.
Think along
Meridiae is a proposal, and that word is chosen on purpose. There is little here to impose in any case: no worldwide authority over time zones exists, and every country already decides about its own clock.
On the map below you can look around in it. Click anywhere on the world and you see when the sun stands highest there, now and with Meridiae. And shift the bands by half a turn, because that is where the real dial sits. Then you see countries slide towards each other and others apart, and the question rises of its own accord which boundaries you would rather see coincide.
What would it mean for you if your clock ran with your morning again?
