I think that UTC and GMT are not the same thing. Wikipedia explains it.

**LINK**

So according to wikipedia '' the term GMT should not be used for anything requiring precision''.

So the next time I trim half a foot too much from the Privet hedge I'll call it 6 inches and all will be fine?

I have always thought that this tells us a lot about the French :

[quote]
The French did not adopt the Greenwich meridian as the beginning of the universal day until 1911. Even then it refused to use the name "Greenwich", instead using the term "Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds". France finally replaced this phrase with "Coordinated Universal Time" (UTC) in 1978.^[13] [/quote]

MichaelG.

.

Ref. __ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Conference

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 31/10/2021 18:03:37

The EU were apparently doing away with the Summer/Winter time changes and with any luck the U.K. would have followed.

 It got voted through then seems to have got bogged down the mass of countries involved.

The EU had a chance to do something useful then appear to have fallen at the hurdles.

link about it here:-

Lost cause?

Edited By V8Eng on 31/10/2021 20:55:57

It's a North-South thing. Winter nights get longer in proportion to reducing daylight the closer you get to the pole. As a result switching to and from summer-time makes good sense in Scotland and Sweden, but is less obviously worth doing in London, and it's value diminishes as one heads towards the equator. No-one cares about daylight saving in Malta!

The North-south divide evident in most countries makes the daylight saving a political issue throughout Europe. In the UK, is it in the interest of national unity for the south of England who don't care much to annoy the North by scrapping daylight savings? Please don't discuss!

I think the way folk confuse technology and politics quite odd. GMT was a method of defining international time based on astronomical observations and it was to humanities advantage to know what the time was around the globe. Like Whitworth, GMT was an important stepping stone, not proof Britain is top-nation.

Most counties didn't adopt GMT as their local time, instead offsetting GMT to make their 12am close to local noon. This idea developed into time zones. French politicians were upset when the Greenwich Meridian was adopted because they felt felt it damaged French prestige. Silly them: Greenwich was adopted for a solid practical reason, nothing to do with misplaced patriotic pride. At the time most of the world's hydrography had been done by the British Navy so almost all Maritime Charts expressed Longitude relative to London. Solid achievement, not flag waving.

GMT doesn't exist in the sense that anyone measures and distributes it. It's a folk memory, which lives on because it happens to be much the same as British Standard Time and because everyone hates change. No-one at the Greenwich Observatory adjusts chronometers relative to star transits and sends GMT based time signals around the world.

If GMT were still being measured, it would differ slightly from UTC because astronomical movements are a little erratic. For domestic purposes the difference is much too small to matter, but it does when precision is important. Precise time is provided by Atomic Clocks, which can be located anywhere.

The international time system is remarkably complicated, but it covers the needs of everyone from man in shed to nano-technology.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 01/11/2021 10:29:38