Spring forward. Fall back. Twice a year, Americans change their clocks, and twice a year, we ask the same question: Why are we still doing this?
But the debate over who decides what time it is goes back much further. In early America, towns kept their own time based on the sun. Then came the railroads, the telegraph, and the need for a nation to operate on the same clock.
Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman explore how America went from local time to standardized time zones with historian Michael O'Malley of George Mason University, author of Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, including the origins of daylight saving time and why the debate continues more than a century later.
Then, physicist Chad Orzel of Union College, author of A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks, explains how atomic clocks keep our modern world running, from GPS satellites and smartphones to the technology we depend on every day.
We've never been better at measuring time. So why can't we agree on what to do with it?
