Earth’s Tilt Makes Time Slippery

A sundial can be almost 16 minutes fast in November and 14 minutes slow in February, yet there's nothing wrong with it. So why does the Sun, our oldest timekeeper, disagree with the clock on your wrist? In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) explore the equation of time - the strange relationship between Earth's tilt, its orbit around the Sun and the way we measure our days. Why does a day last 24 hours? Has it always been that way? And how can a piece of ancient coral reveal that time itself has changed? To find out, Hannah and Michael investigate an ingenious sundial that appears to correct its own mistakes, and discover the extraordinary places on Earth where shadows disappear completely. Along the way, they explore why sailors relied on the stars, the Moon's remarkable journey across London's sky, and the curious fact that the Pacific Ocean is so enormous it meets itself on the other side of the world. Michael's references:https://rl.se/subsolarpoint https://www.curiositybox.com/pages/closest-approach-to-uranus-------------------For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellProducer: Simona Rata + Lucy LipscombeSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:03Michael Stevens?

  And I am Michael Stevens. And today, I want to talk about sundials and

• 0:08Hannah Fry?

  Ooh, yes, please.

• 0:08Michael Stevens?

  why they are so bad. What did you say?

• 0:13Hannah Fry?

  I said, yes, please.

• 0:16Michael Stevens?

  Well, good. That's good. I'm glad. I'm glad. I just heard something come out of your mouth. I was staring into the camera for dramatic effect and I thought, oh, my gosh, comments from the peanut gallery already.

• 0:25Hannah Fry?

  Shall we take opposing positions on sundials for comedic effect throughout the course of this episode?

• 0:30Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Do you want to be pro or against?

• 0:32Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I'm definitely pro.

• 0:34Michael Stevens?

  Okay, I'll be against. Boy, having to be anti-sundial is a very strange position for me to take as someone who loves sundials. But I've always been disappointed in them because they never agree with my watch or my phone. You'll find them in parks or public places or private residences and they're beautiful. They're often like so cool and I want them to be so powerful. And yet, when I really look at it and I say, oh, okay, so it's 12:11? And I look and it's actually like 12:25. And I'm like, oh, well, you know, is this just not set up right? And they're like, no, it's set up by like an expert sundial crafter and astronomer.

• 1:19Michael Stevens?

  And I'm like, well, why is it not, not right? And they're like, well,

• 1:26Michael Stevens?

  what does it mean to be right? What time is it really?

• 1:29Hannah Fry?

  What time is it really?

• 1:31Michael Stevens?

  Well, why, why doesn't it agree with the time on my phone? The time that we live our lives by, civil time? And the answer is the equation of time. And it's something that I have not been able to, I think, explain or even understand myself clearly enough. I might be getting close. And so I wanted to kind of talk through it today because it has a lot to say about the way we live in society today and what the earth actually does.

• 2:01Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 2:04Michael Stevens?

  All right, here's something really cool. The earliest written description of cancer that we've ever found is from an ancient Egyptian papyrus that was around before even Cleopatra was on the throne.

• 2:15Hannah Fry?

  It described tumors being removed by a tool that they called the fire drill, which we think was used to burn off diseased tissue.

• 2:24Michael Stevens?

  Beating a disease that's so ancient and complex with over 200 different types. It's not going to happen overnight.

• 2:30Hannah Fry?

  But thanks to research, cancer treatment has advanced a lot. And Cancer Research UK is driving further innovations like cancer-sniffing robots and drugs made from gut bugs that could change the future of medicine.

• 2:43Michael Stevens?

  Over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK's work has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And today, it's continuing to save and improve lives around the world.

• 2:53Hannah Fry?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restiscience.

• 3:11Speaker 02

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• 3:52Speaker 02

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• 4:37Michael Stevens?

  So, you know, we've, we've done an episode on time and how we keep time. I think it's called something like, What Day Is It Really? And you guys should go listen to that one after this. I won't be repeating much information at all from that older episode. But today, I wanted to talk about the problem that happens with a sundial. So first of all, what is a sundial trying to do? It's trying to do what people did for most of human history, which is get a sense of when it was by looking at where the sun is or isn't. And like one, one way, like a way that we know that people did in very ancient times was to say, well, the day begins when the sun comes up. Like, that's even how a lot of people think of it today.

• 5:22Michael Stevens?

  Having to explain to my daughter, well, actually, the day begins at midnight. She's like, what the heck? Why doesn't it begin when the sun comes up? It's also confusing to say, well, you know, days are shorter in the winter for us. And she's like, um, yeah, that makes sense. And I'm like, oh, by the way, they're not actually shorter. Civilly, it's still midnight to midnight, but the sun is up for longer. And that used to be what a day was. Ay, ay, ay.

• 5:51Hannah Fry?

  Except they're so much shorter.

• 5:55Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, exactly. It winds up being a really uneven way to measure a day. If you just say from sunrise to sunset in the winter, days are like really short. And then in the summer, they're really long. And if you try to build any kind of clock, any kind of mechanism that's regularly doing something, say, dropping sand from, from, from the top to the bottom or drops of water, it just winds up not dropping the same amount day to day because the days are getting longer and shorter throughout the year. And a slightly less messy way to measure the day came about a little bit later in our history, but still in ancient times. And it was the concept of a solar day.

• 6:40Michael Stevens?

  Okay, instead of focusing on when the sun rose and set, you focus on how long, how much time passes between when the sun is at its highest point in the sky to when it's back at its highest point in the sky. That's noon to noon.

• 6:58Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 6:59Michael Stevens?

  And that is a lot less variable. In the winter, the sun is, you know, rising a lot later, but it's reaching its highest point with a little less variability. But it still varies. And that's the problem. That's the heart of this problem. Sundials are set around solar time. And solar time from noon to noon is still just not always the same throughout the year.

• 7:24Hannah Fry?

  When I first read about that, I was pretty blown away. I, I think it just never occurred to me that this whole phrase meantime was saying, oh, you need to find an average across the course of the year because there's a variation, right? It was, it was wild to me that I just never made that connection. Wild to me that the, the length of noon to noon could actually be different across the course of the year. But then, of course, it is. It's a wobbly rock in space.

• 7:56Michael Stevens?

  It's a wobbly rock in space and it's not going around the sun in a perfect circle at the same speed all the time. Funny enough, for us in the northern hemisphere, in the winter, the earth is a bit closer to the sun. So it's moving faster. It's speeding around, trying to finish its lap, its yearly lap faster in our winter in the southern hemisphere's summer. So January is like when we're closest to the sun. A sundial uses shadows cast by what's called a gnomon. And that shadow falls on the face of the dial and the shadow should point at what time it is. And the way you set up a sundial is that you say, okay, I want the, the

• 8:39Michael Stevens?

  the shortest shadow it ever casts to be at noon. Because noon is when the sun is highest in the sky, shadows are the shortest. So that's noon. You run into all kinds of problems, of course, besides just the wobbly rock that we live on when you try to measure time this way. You also, of course, run into the problem of where are we measuring this? Because when the sun is really at its maximum peak, its, its highest point in the sky for me, that's, it's not in the highest point for someone who is 1,000 kilometers west of me. That wasn't really a problem until we invented railroads and we could suddenly move across the earth so quickly that we were like, oh, shoot, wait a second, I'm hungry, but it's not lunchtime yet.

• 9:23Michael Stevens?

  Oh, oh, that's right. I've gone around the curve of the earth. The, the, I'm, I'm finding the sun later. I'm leaving the earth's shadow later.

• 9:33Hannah Fry?

  Wait, can I ask you some questions?

• 9:35Michael Stevens?

  Yes.

• 9:36Hannah Fry?

  How much does the length of a day change across a year? How much are we talking here? Are we talking minutes? Are we talking seconds? What's the, what's the variation?

• 9:47Michael Stevens?

  We're talking minutes. So.

• 9:52Michael Stevens?

  A sundial is going to run as much as 16 minutes ahead in November, according to, compared to civil time, which is we're trying to keep time really regularly. In November, a sundial is going to wind up being fast. It's going to be ahead of what our clock times say, like our civil clocks that are built to be really regular. The sundial will be 16 minutes faster than the timekeepers are trying to be regular. And then in February, they're about 14 minutes slower.

• 10:22Hannah Fry?

  So that doesn't mean, just to be clear about this, because I think I've made this mistake in the past. That doesn't mean that a day in February is 14 minutes longer, shorter, whatever. Because it's just cumulative. If you're down by a few seconds every day, the clock runs slower, runs slower, runs slower, runs slower, runs slower. And then it turns around and comes back.

• 10:42Michael Stevens?

  That's right. Yeah. So it accumulates this, this difference between the behavior of the sun and our regular clocks that are trying to like, every second is the same length. And there should be a certain number of them per day. Those fall off and then they catch back up and then, oh, now we're too far ahead. Now we're too far behind. And this happens every single year. And it happens for two reasons. Now, first of all, if the earth was not tilted and the sun was just always over the equator, directly overhead at the equator, and the earth orbited the sun in a perfect circle,

• 11:27Michael Stevens?

  there would never be any disparity. We really could use an atomic clock to predict and count the same number of ticks between noon and noon everywhere on earth. It would be really easy. But that's not the world that we live in. Instead.

• 11:43Hannah Fry?

  Hold on, you, hold on, hold on, hold on. I want to stress test this because you just said an atomic clock. I mean, surely there's also like energy loss, right? So over millennia longer, millions of years, you would end up getting some slippage.

• 12:04Michael Stevens?

  Yes. Okay. That's a very good point. I wasn't factoring in, I wasn't factoring in the really small variabilities caused by changes in earth's rotation or its orbit because of, you know, the mass of Jupiter out there. There is variability. There's a wobble to earth's orbit. I'm imagining a perfect, precise model where the earth is spinning at the same speed, around the sun in a perfect circle at the same speed.

• 12:30Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 12:31Michael Stevens?

  The, the, the plane of earth's orbit exactly intersects right through the equator. Okay? That, that's the world where atomic clock time and astronomical time are the same.

• 12:45Hannah Fry?

  Just as a side note, it is slowing down because you can tell by looking at fossilized coral. So I'd love this so much, but basically coral is, I mean, it's a living organism and it, and it puts down layers every single day. And you can see, if you look at microscopically, you can see the fluctuations that happen in these layers as you go from day to night, but also across the seasons. So you can go back to coral that's like millions of years old. And you can see in it that there used to be more days per year than there currently is.

• 13:21Michael Stevens?

  Ah, so the days were shorter, more of them would happen in a year.

• 13:26Hannah Fry?

  Quicker spin. So the earth is slowing down. Anyway, but that's fine. We'll ignore that. For the purposes of this, we'll ignore that.

• 13:33Michael Stevens?

  We're going to ignore it just to like focus on what's causing the majority of this regular swinging back and forth of the sundial versus the civil clock. But I do love that we can do that. And now that you bring that up, I remember, I think I even talked about this before, that days used to be different and the moon used to be closer. I mean, man, if you could go back two billion years and walk around on earth, it would be a whole nother planet. You know, it really was. And it reminds me too, that we can look at other evidence like that. For example, there are fish, there were ancient fish, their bones grew seasonally.

• 14:13Michael Stevens?

  And so we can look at their bones and figure out when in the year they died. And that's how we were able to pinpoint the impact of the Chicxulub meteor, the one that eventually led to the extinction of the dinosaurs to, within, you know, 65 million years ago, plus or minus a bunch, but we know it happened in the spring. We know less about what year that hit than the season.

• 14:40Hannah Fry?

  I love that. I love that so much.

• 14:43Michael Stevens?

  The solar system is a mess. It's, it's not perfect. If you wanted to set a watch by it, good luck.

• 14:50Hannah Fry?

  Good luck.

• 14:50Michael Stevens?

  Actually.

• 14:51Hannah Fry?

  You're going to be late for your meeting.

• 14:52Michael Stevens?

  You're going to be late for your meetings, but is that the fault of the solar system or the fault of us for trying to invent the way we think time should go? Well, we'll get to that later. But basically, if you try to measure a day, a solar day by clocking when the sun is at its highest point in the sky to when it's next at its highest point in the sky. What you're doing is you're measuring time by saying, when is my meridian pointed at the sun? And when is it pointed at the sun again? A meridian is an imaginary line that you are on right now, your own personal meridian. And it's a line that stretches from the north pole to the south pole and goes through you.

• 15:33Michael Stevens?

  And when that line points at the sun, it is noon for you right where you are. Someone who is a mile west of you, isn't quite experiencing noon yet. Earth is going to still turn a little bit for them. And the sun is going to appear to be a little higher in the sky later for them. But for you, it's going to be just going down after that point. The sundial works off of that principle. So if I put a sundial in, in, in Colorado and I put one in Utah, they're not going to have short shadows. They're not going to show noon simultaneously. All right. That's pretty easy to understand.

• 16:10Hannah Fry?

  Which is also good though, you know, it's not good if you're running trains, sure. But it is sort of more connected to, to the, the world you actually live in.

• 16:20Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. It's, it's, it's not embodied, but it's in-erthed, you know? You're, you're getting time as it's given to you by major features of your environment. So we've got earth. Imagine your meridian line from the north pole to the south pole passing through you. It's pointed directly at the sun. All right? Now, that doesn't mean that the sun's right overhead. We're going to get to that later. But it doesn't mean that the sun's the highest it'll be in the sky that day. Now, in order for another day to start, you need to go all the way around

• 16:55Michael Stevens?

  and point your meridian back at the sun. Okay? Now, earth, earth's rotation is pretty darn constant. There isn't a lot slowing it down. It's certainly not being slowed down by friction with outer space. You know, there are things that affect it, as we've just mentioned. But a much bigger cause of, of the discrepancy in that being regular is the fact that the earth is also orbiting the sun. In the time it takes the earth to turn around once around its own axis, it's already moved about a 365th of its orbit around the sun. Okay?

• 17:29Hannah Fry?

  I see where you're going with this.

• 17:31Michael Stevens?

  See where I'm going with this? And this is where it really helps to do some experiments with like a globe or a ball in your hand at home. But to kind of give us some context here, the earth turns so that the west chases the east. I always think of it as the United States, the shape of the US is kind of like an animal where Florida is a leg and, and Texas is the other leg and Maine is like the head. And it's just, it's running forward. Okay? So the west is chasing the east. So if you were to look down at the north pole, the earth is turning counterclockwise.

• 18:05Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 18:06Michael Stevens?

  And it's also orbiting the sun counterclockwise. Okay? It's good to remember that. So we see it in movies. You can always be like, ooh, that's right. Or, ooh, they did that wrong. Anyway, anyway, what happens is that in order for the day to end, you are sort of like trying to move east to catch up with where you were the day before with this, with your meridian pointing at the sun. But if you have moved a little bit, by the time you've turned 360 degrees, the sun isn't right in front of you anymore.

• 18:38Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 18:39Michael Stevens?

  The sun is now a little bit behind because you've moved.

• 18:42Hannah Fry?

  So you basically have to go, so just to copy your thing. So if I was right here every single time, it'd be like, okay, and bam. But actually I've sort of moved this way.

• 18:54Michael Stevens?

  That's right.

• 18:55Hannah Fry?

  While turning.

• 18:56Michael Stevens?

  You turn 360 degrees and now you're not pointed back at us again. You've got an average of four more minutes of rotation every day that you have to do to complete and point back at the sun. Now, the, the very distant stars move a lot less, okay, as earth orbits, right? And so that day, which is called the sidereal day, it is a lot more constant. Okay? The sidereal day, funny enough, I was like, what's the etymology of sidereal? And it comes from Latin side or sidus, which meant stars. And it's, it's possible that words like consider come from the same root word.

• 19:39Michael Stevens?

  So when you consider something, originally you were with the stars. Sidus, sidereal, consid-er. You're with the stars. So there's this theory that the word consider. May have come from navigation that originally, when you tried to figure out where to go, you would look at the stars. And when you tried to figure out where to go and what decisions to make in life, you would also look to the stars for answers. You would consider them. Now, that's not totally proven. There's also a theory that the word consider comes

• 20:20Michael Stevens?

  from stretch or length, which is like where the word side comes from. So considering maybe just like looking at the whole thing. But I love that there might have been this time in human history where we gradually started to think on our own more, feel a little bit less guided by either voices in our heads, or instinct, or ancestors, or feelings. And we did a lot more internal interior cognition. And so we just kind of took the same word for being guided by something outside of us and made it what it's like to think for

• 21:01Michael Stevens?

  yourself. Consider with the stars, consider in my own head by myself.

• 21:06Hannah Fry?

  But that makes a lot of sense, though, why people would navigate with the stars. The fact that they're so much further away, this extra effect. Because, I mean, I always thought it was like, why are you using the stars? You know, if it's cloudy, if it's like bad weather, you've got no hope. Whereas the sun, good luck missing the sun, right? You know exactly where it is, even on a cloudy day. And this is like crazy cloudy. You've got a much better chance of like working out where the sun is. But that's the reason why they would navigate by the stars, because you just end up with, I guess, a more accurate sense of when it is and thus where you are.

• 21:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. I mean, people figured out that, yeah, the sun is different, but like, we can still find regularities in it and tell the time, the solar time. But, okay, so, so we understand that the Earth has to rotate 360 degrees around for there to be a day, and then an additional four more minutes of rotation for there to have been a solar day. But that's still just, you know, if it's just four minutes every day, then that's still a regular amount, is the same amount every day. The reason it's not is twofold. One is that Earth's orbit is eccentric, okay? It's a bit of an ellipse. Instead of

• 22:27Michael Stevens?

  just going regularly at one speed around the sun, it goes, it kind of whips and goes far away and comes back in and whips again and whips again. So in the winter, when we're closer to the sun, northern hemisphere winter in January, we are moving faster around the sun and we're closer to it, which means there's more rotation, more, more duration of rotating the Earth has to do for the solar day to, to end and for a new one to begin. So there's that variation. There's another variation that's really hard to visualize. But the way I'm gonna recommend doing it is to just imagine that someone is holding a rod horizontally

• 23:07Michael Stevens?

  in front of you, okay? It's parallel to the ground, okay? And this person is doing what you just did in your chair. They're spinning around on their own axis.

• 23:17Hannah Fry?

  I've got a straw, hang on.

• 23:18Michael Stevens?

  Okay, get a straw.

• 23:19Hannah Fry?

  It's a long pink straw.

• 23:20Michael Stevens?

  So hold that horizontal, perfectly horizontal, and we're going to imagine that that's the equator, okay? And we're going to imagine that we, the viewers looking at you, are the sun, you're the Earth, and we're looking at that equator. Now, if you turn all the way around your own axis.

• 23:36Hannah Fry?

  I'm the Earth, yeah?

• 23:37Michael Stevens?

  You're the Earth. So turn, yep. And now you've come back, a solar day is done. But now do it and orbit us a little bit.

• 23:46Hannah Fry?

  Okay. All right, okay, here we go.

• 23:54Michael Stevens?

  Very, this is really good, by the way. We did not reverse this. Okay, now you gotta turn a little bit more. Okay, so as you can see, as she orbited us, she kind of dragged the old noon point to our left, okay? So that point was dragged, actually, like exactly, just, just, it was just dragged along that equator line. So she had to make up all of that time. She had to rotate to make up for that eastward shift. But in the spring and fall, the Earth's tilt makes it so that the equator isn't pointing right at the sun. It's

• 24:37Michael Stevens?

  tilted, okay? So the Earth's orbit drags that equator, or that, that subsolar point at noon, not just directly east, but instead northeast or southeast.

• 24:51Hannah Fry?

  Of course, of course. Okay, so let's say that you've got the middle point at that. I do it?

• 24:56Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. So now go ahead and rotate with this tilted equator.

• 25:00Hannah Fry?

  So now, it's like.

• 25:06Michael Stevens?

  Yep, there you go.

• 25:06Hannah Fry?

  This is how I expected my life to turn out, Michael.

• 25:08Michael Stevens?

  Okay. And now, the point that needs to come back to me has just shifted kind of not just to what would be your west, but a little bit north or south. And so I don't have as much rotation to the east to do, or you don't, in order for the day to complete. Okay. Now, those two things combine to cause the length of the solar day to be variable in a really messy way. So if you ever find a really good sundial, it'll probably have a plaque next to it that has a graph, that's got months and days of the year, and then a number of minutes to add or subtract. And then it'll have a little curve, not a, not

• 25:53Michael Stevens?

  a, not a regular curve, but some kind of thing that goes up and then it comes down a lot and then up a little bit. It's a mess. That's showing you the combined effect of Earth's eccentric orbit and its axial tilt on the length of the solar day. So when you look at the sundial and it says, yep, it's noon right now, you need to look at that equation of time plaque and it'll say, oh, okay, well, if it's July 8th, then you need to add or subtract this many minutes to what the sundial says to match what civil mean time is. And that number is going to be different every day. The, the time it takes from noon to noon on a sundial is sometimes a little bit shorter than average, sometimes a little

• 26:38Michael Stevens?

  bit longer than average. And the equation of time allows us to correct the sundial so that it matches what our regular beating mechanical clocks on Earth say the time should be. So I was always sort of disappointed in this, not only because it meant that a sundial was off by either 16 minutes ahead or 14 behind throughout the year, but it also was so hard to visualize in my mind why it was happening. But I dedicated myself to it, and I've made a few videos about it. And now I've talked about it on a podcast. But what I want to show you is the Schmoyer sundial.

• 27:17Hannah Fry?

  Ooh, yeah.

• 27:18Michael Stevens?

  This is a sundial that was invented by Richard Schmoyer back in 1958. And he called it the Sunquest sundial. And this is it. Or at least this is a version of it.

• 27:32Hannah Fry?

  Right. Okay, we should describe, we should describe for people who are listening here. So what Michael is holding up, it's almost like two horseshoes that are attached perpendicular to one another, almost as though you took a globe and you cut out all of the volume of the Earth and just left a line along the longitude and one along the latitude that meet in a perpendicular way. And then through the middle of the Earth, it's got a little pin and attached to it is what can only be described as a plastic bit of bacon.

• 28:05Michael Stevens?

  Yes, yes. Bacon is a really great description for this, because it's a wavy piece of plastic. And so this gnomon is what you're describing. It's, it's what casts, well, it does cast a shadow, but we'll get more to that later. It's wavy so that the way light passes through it is sometimes a little bit later and sometimes a little bit earlier, depending on the time of year. And also, instead of casting a shadow, this casts a ray of light onto the time, because there's a slit in that piece of bacon, in the gnomon. And the sun passes through this. And as you can see, if I turn it, that strip is like almost an S shape. And so sometimes

• 28:49Michael Stevens?

  the sunlight will come through it early, because we're at the back of the S, and sometimes it's going to take the sun a little longer to line up with the part of the S that's forward. So depending on the time of, of the year, this will either cast the sun's shadow a little bit sooner or a little bit later. And that curve is exactly what's called the annalemma, which means that this corrects for the equation of time automatically.

• 29:15Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 29:17Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Hannah Fry?

  No, that's amazing.

• 29:20Michael Stevens?

  The the trade off is that you have to adjust this gnomon every time you want to check the time.

• 29:25Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 29:26Michael Stevens?

  You can't just sit there and you come and look at the shadow or the ray of light. You have to point this gnomon towards the sun and create as narrow of a beam of light as you can. And when it gets really narrow, that's the correct time. And it will be the time, when I say correct time, I mean, it will be the time that your phone connected to the grid says it is.

• 29:49Hannah Fry?

  Hang on, hang on. Could you not do some elaborate thing where you attach attach it to like a fulcrum pendulum or something that changes according to the rotation of the earth? So there's like some automatic way, but that uses sort of, you know, like mechanics rather than electronics.

• 30:07Michael Stevens?

  Well, sure, yeah. I mean, you could, you could create a model of the earth and sun system and build the correction in that way.

• 30:16Hannah Fry?

  When you're twisting it, you're twisting it based on basically the time of day rather than the time of the year or anything.

• 30:21Michael Stevens?

  Yes, you're twisting it so that you only capture sunlight through a very narrow slit. And that slit, depending on how high up the sun is, is either going to be part of the the slit that's more like east or more west, because it's like this S shaped slit. The amount of curve in that slit is exactly lined up to correct for the equation of time. So.

• 30:48Hannah Fry?

  When was this invented? This this?

• 30:50Michael Stevens?

  In the late 50s.

• 30:51Hannah Fry?

  It's amazing. I love it.

• 30:53Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's amazing. And I just love it because you really could make all of your Zoom calls and get your kids to school at the right time by using the sun if this was your sundial. And it was. That's why, if you look, this one that I'm holding, it's pretty like brown. It used to be a nice, clean gray, but this has just been outside telling us time every day.

• 31:15Hannah Fry?

  Well, you have it in your house, in your garden.

• 31:17Michael Stevens?

  Well, I did in Los Angeles. I now live in Colorado. So to be, and some of you eagle eyed viewers may have already noticed that I have this set for a location in Los Angeles, not in Colorado. I have not set this outside here in Colorado. One problem is that we don't have a like as much direct sun here. We've got a lot more tree cover where we live. So I wouldn't actually be able to tell time very well with this most of the time. But in LA, we had direct sun all day.

• 31:45Hannah Fry?

  Every day, maybe.

• 31:46Michael Stevens?

  Certain part of our yard. So that was a perfect solar timekeeping corner of the of the yard. I love this. And I loved it so much that we, me and the Curiosity Box team, reached out to the North American Sundial Society and said, can you get a hold of Richard Schmoyer? And they were like, no, he's deceased. But we got a hold of his family. And we said, we want to make these. And so I'm holding one that we made. We licensed the the design from them. And we said, is there anything that you would like us to add? And they were like, yes, we want it to work in both the northern and southern hemisphere. So we did that. And you'll notice that you can actually take this apart and this this northern hemisphere

• 32:28Michael Stevens?

  can be switched over so that the southern hemisphere is on top. You just turn, you just turn this piece over. And now you can use it down in Australia, New Zealand.

• 32:39Hannah Fry?

  Amazing.

• 32:40Michael Stevens?

  It was very cool because I'm kind of, it feels a little bit like bragging, but this is not me, this is our whole team. After we sent this out to our subscribers, we got a message from the North American Sundial Society saying, whoa, you know what? You guys just became the largest single maker of sundials in human history. Yeah. So the woman who reached out to us was the vice president of the North American Sundial Society, Tahisha Wei. And she said, look, the the single entity that made the most sundials in history was probably a painter who went around and painted sundials on people's homes and then stuck a gnomon in.

• 33:24Michael Stevens?

  So, you know, you've got like, oh, the shadow kind of tells you the time. But she was like, in a lifetime, these painters at most would have made like 5,000, but we made more than 20,000 of these.

• 33:36Hannah Fry?

  Amazing.

• 33:37Michael Stevens?

  Now, I don't know how to feel about that because I feel like there's got to be some company in China that's made a whole bunch of like cheap, you know, sundial pendants or something. But in terms of sundials that that are really able to tell you the time and were built for that purpose with a lot of thought behind them.

• 33:54Hannah Fry?

  I think claim it. Look, honestly, I think claim it. Claim it. Claim it. That's good. I think you deserve a plaque on the wall. A plaque on the wall with the shadow that's cast.

• 34:06Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Hannah Fry?

  Maybe you should do it like Indiana Jones, where the plaque on the wall doesn't tell you anything until it's exactly noon. And at that moment in time, you can see that you hold the record.

• 34:15Michael Stevens?

  There you go. I love that. I love those kinds of things. And we're going to talk about some things like that after the break, when we dive a little deeper into this subsolar point.

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• 36:05Michael Stevens?

  Okay, welcome back. So we've been talking about solar time, which is reckoned by the subsolar point. I think it's been pretty clear, but the subsolar point is the point on earth directly underneath the sun. And when that point hits your meridian, boom, it's solar noon. Anyway, what I've always loved about the subsolar point is that sometimes you can be at it, meaning the sun is at the zenith, which is the point of the sky directly above your head, meaning the sun is right above you. And this is only possible in the in tropical and subtropical regions on earth. So it's never going to happen for me in Colorado or you in London. The sun will never be directly above your head because of the way.

• 36:50Hannah Fry?

  Are we talking here? We're talking about essentially a place where at midday, there are literally no shadows.

• 36:56Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. Yeah. Or, I mean, there are shadows, but they go directly down. They project directly down from the object to the ground. So if you have something like a bollard in the ground that has vertical sides, it casts no shadow at all. Even in direct sunlight, it's just lit all over because its shadow is falling directly below itself where its base is. And so everything looks weird. If you haven't seen photos of the world when the sun is directly overhead, look them up because it looks fake. It looks like everything's photoshopped in. You know, there's just, they're not casting shadows. Obviously, like a car will have a visible shadow because you can look underneath the

• 37:40Michael Stevens?

  car, but the car's shadow is exactly the size of the car right below it. And a person stands there and they've got maybe a little tiny shadow around their feet from their body or where their nose pokes out. But it's really trippy.

• 37:55Hannah Fry?

  Have you ever seen it?

• 37:56Michael Stevens?

  I've never seen it in person. I've never been in the right place at the right time to see it.

• 38:01Hannah Fry?

  Do you know what? We need to, we need to go and do, we need to rest, rest in science tour to go and see it.

• 38:07Michael Stevens?

  We do. And you know what? Unlike trying to to to find a good place on earth's surface for an eclipse, directly overhead sun is happening all the time. I mean, in fact.

• 38:17Hannah Fry?

  Right, you're right.

• 38:18Michael Stevens?

  There's a really cool subsolar point website. We'll put this in the description, rl.se slash slash subsolar point. And the subsolar point right now is, drumroll, please, it is just off the coast of South America. Okay, so it's, it's just a little. Yeah, we'll get on a boat. Okay, so right now, it's only, I'd say, a few hundred, maybe 500 miles southeast of the Galapagos Islands. And I love to look at this website every now and then be like, oh, yeah, who's, who's directly under the sun right now? The only place in the United States where the sun is ever directly overhead is in Hawaii.

• 39:02Michael Stevens?

  And they have a name for the event of of the shadows disappearing. They call it Lahaina Noon.

• 39:12Michael Stevens?

  Lahaina means cruel sun.

• 39:17Michael Stevens?

  La means sun or day and haina means cruel. So it's called the cruel sun. Interestingly, that's not the traditional name. That name was come up within, I think, like the eighties or nineties by a university. The traditional name that the Hawaiian native people gave the sun being right above them was ka'kala i'kalolo. And that means the sun is resting on its brains.

• 39:46Michael Stevens?

  I don't know what they meant by that. I looked through a Hawaiian dictionary to figure out like, what do they mean by the sun resting on its brains? And I still don't know. If anyone can help, let me know. But I love that. It's a longer thing to say.

• 40:01Hannah Fry?

  So I've just looked off a map of America and I don't think I'd realized this until now, but Hawaii is further south than every other point, including Florida, which is why they're the only place that gets it, right?

• 40:14Michael Stevens?

  That's right. That's right. And I think that a lot of me, I'm speaking for myself here. When I was younger, I thought Hawaii was more like off the coast of California because that's the way maps would do it. They'd be like, oh, and then we're going to put Hawaii over here. But really it's off the coast of Mexico. It's down south.

• 40:32Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Michael Stevens?

  I've, I've loved Lahaina noon for as long as I ever knew about the concept. In Hawaii, there's a sculpture made by Asama Naguchi called Skygate. And it is a wavy loop that rests on, I think, three supports. It looks like a silly band bracelet, you know, that's parallel to the ground. And every day, the shadow cast by it is this goofy circular, it's this goofy wavy loop, except during Lahaina noon, where its projection onto the ground is a perfect circle.

• 41:12Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 41:12Hannah Fry?

  Don't.

• 41:14Michael Stevens?

  I love it.

• 41:15Hannah Fry?

  Oh, my Lord, I love it.

• 41:16Michael Stevens?

  And I've been to it at a time when its shadow was a wavy, loopy, inflatable tube man. But on Lahaina noon, it's a perfect circle. And one of my dreams is to be there and witness that when it happens. You only have a few minutes to experience Lahaina noon. Okay, I was home alone in Los Angeles one night and I looked outside and there was a full moon. So it was quite bright. The sky was clear and I was kind of freaked out and I couldn't place why everything looked so weird until I realized that the moon was almost directly overhead.

• 41:55Hannah Fry?

  It's in Lahaina midnight.

• 41:57Michael Stevens?

  A Lahaina midnight, right? That's what I was like, oh my gosh, I've never heard of this. So I took a bunch of photos and I took a croquet stick and shoved it in the ground to try to capture it with no shadow. Because of course, everything else outside, like lawn chairs and stuff, they did have shadows. They were just directly underneath.

• 42:17Hannah Fry?

  But underneath, right.

• 42:18Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I want to, I wanted to put things out that would have no shadow and it didn't quite happen. I waited around, the shadow was a little, a little bit off center. So they had little tiny moon shadows and I just kept waiting, hoping that like the moon would keep getting closer and hit the center and it never did. But Lahaina midnight was the name that I thought of first for that, but it's not quite the right name because what's happening isn't midnight. The sun isn't on the opposite side of the earth as me.

• 42:51Hannah Fry?

  It's Lahaina moon.

• 42:53Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, Lahaina moon, but Lahaina moon would mean cruel sun moon, which maybe isn't that off. But just a few weeks ago, I revisited this and I looked at what Lahaina noon meant and I saw that la means sun, haina means cruel. And I said, well, what is, what is Hawaiian for moon? And Hawaiian for moon is mahaina. So let me just make sure I've got this. Right. So, so cruel moon would be mahaina haina.

• 43:33Michael Stevens?

  And that is when the moon is directly above you. Now, unfortunately, it doesn't happen in the UK. You guys are too far north for the moon to ever be at the zenith. The highest the moon ever gets in the sky for, for London is 67.1 degrees above the horizon, not a full 90. And that happens only once every about 18.6 years. So the next one.

• 43:58Hannah Fry?

  So sorry, you're gonna have to go south.

• 44:00Michael Stevens?

  The, the next one won't happen until 2043.

• 44:04Hannah Fry?

  Do you know what? Seriously, too far south for the northern lights, too far north for the, for the excellent soda events like this, which is, what's the point in being here?

• 44:12Michael Stevens?

  Well, I know, that's how I feel too. I have a funny thing though. Did you guys notice anything interesting on October 2nd?

• 44:21Hannah Fry?

  No, tell me.

• 44:23Michael Stevens?

  You didn't notice that the moon was at 66.8 degrees above the horizon in London?

• 44:28Hannah Fry?

  Do you know what? Yeah, actually passed me by, I'm sorry.

• 44:30Michael Stevens?

  It was at 5:32 in the morning, you, you didn't notice?

• 44:32Hannah Fry?

  Okay, no, I, I think I was sleeping. I think I was sleeping.

• 44:36Michael Stevens?

  Well, 66.8 degrees is just shy, just three tenths of a degree shy of the highest it can ever get in London. So it's a special, special moment.

• 44:44Hannah Fry?

  Right, okay. Yeah, I mean, that, that does feel pretty special. Have you come across Henry Segaman?

• 44:50Michael Stevens?

  Yes, I've met him a number of times. He's fantastic.

• 44:53Hannah Fry?

  He's so great. So what he does is he prints these shapes, sort of mathematical 3D printing. And one of them I got for a friend for a wedding present. They were these candle holders and they're basically, they're sort of like wrapped up in this globe. And it's all, you know, got these like little spokes on it. But when you, when you view it overhead from, with a single light source centrally above it, the shadow flattens out on the surface below to be, to make this perfect rectangular grid. It's like, it's the most glorious thing.

• 45:31Michael Stevens?

  Oh, man, I've, I didn't know that he made candle holders. What a brilliant idea.

• 45:36Hannah Fry?

  I'll be honest with you, maybe it wasn't a candle holder originally and I just.

• 45:40Michael Stevens?

  But that's what you did with it. I've seen him do that, do that with a flashlight he puts inside them. But yeah, just put a candle inside. If you'll humor me for 20 seconds, I'll find his book and we can show them.

• 45:56Michael Stevens?

  Ah, I'm back.

• 45:57Hannah Fry?

  Did you get it?

• 45:58Michael Stevens?

  I couldn't find it. I think it might be at home with my art books because it's hard to place him sometimes.

• 46:03Hannah Fry?

  Right, totally, I agree.

• 46:04Michael Stevens?

  He's a mathematician, but he's also an artist. I found my sundials book, so, you know, it wasn't a total loss. But yeah, I love, I love his work. On the note of like, the moon is sometimes directly overhead, it made me remember the silliest thing. This guy, Artem, that I work with at the Curiosity Box, he loved our Uranus, Source Child Radius shirt so much, he got really obsessed with Uranus and how it sounds like your anus. And he built a calculator that will calculate when Uranus will be closest to you in the next number of however many years you want to put in. I don't even know what to say. Like, I'll, I'll send you the link. We can put it in the description if anyone wants to calculate. But you just type in your exact coordinates on earth, including your altitude, and it

• 46:49Michael Stevens?

  spits out when in the next however many years you want it to look for, when Uranus will be closest to you. And I was like, oh, cool, man.

• 46:59Hannah Fry?

  Oh, hang on, you've got to know your exact latitude and longitude. I'm just gonna do, I'm just gonna do London, you guys.

• 47:05Michael Stevens?

  You can just tap London.

• 47:06Hannah Fry?

  Okay, look, I'll tell you what, we're basically, it's super duper close right now.

• 47:13Michael Stevens?

  Well, you're only searching within a year, so by default.

• 47:17Hannah Fry?

  But it's the closest it'll be all year.

• 47:20Michael Stevens?

  Right now.

• 47:21Hannah Fry?

  Uh huh, I feel very lucky.

• 47:22Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah, I think maybe that's why we're talking about this. It's, it's the Uranus influence. It's on our minds, literally closer to our minds than it's been all year.

• 47:32Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely. Hang on, let me look at, let me look at California, because surely it doesn't actually matter that much what part of the world you're in. I mean, a bit, but we're talking about much bigger distances than the radius of the earth, right?

• 47:43Michael Stevens?

  I know, but I think that where you are in the world will change the closest approach by, you know, up to half a day.

• 47:52Hannah Fry?

  Okay, agree, agree.

• 47:54Michael Stevens?

  And then based on your elevation by a few seconds, maybe?

• 47:57Hannah Fry?

  Yes, you're right. And also he's giving it, he's giving it to the nearest kilometer. So, um, yeah, although the overall curve about how close and far away is, look, guys, right now it's really close, okay? So if you want to, if you want to get out there to Uranus spotting, this is the time.

• 48:13Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I think it probably doesn't look that much different in a telescope. Maybe there's some mystic way in which its proximity affects our Uranus glands or something. I don't know. But anyway, he did it. He made the calculator and it's the only one on the internet so far that I've ever found. So thanks, Artem. There's the shout out. Now I've given, I've given the world knowledge about your creation. While we're just covering wild stuff, I learned this in my research on this topic. The Pacific Ocean is so big, it contains its own antipode, meaning there are two points in the Atlantic Ocean that are on opposite sides of the earth and they're still the same ocean. Yeah.

• 48:57Michael Stevens?

  Where, where are these two points? Good question. The first one is just in the armpit of South America. Okay, so just maybe like a few hundred kilometers off the coast of Chile and Peru, where, where they, where they border each other. And if you were to dig a hole there, under the ocean, through the center of the earth and you came out on the other side, digging a straight line hole, you'd come out in the Gulf of Tonkin.

• 49:21Hannah Fry?

  Which is where?

• 49:22Michael Stevens?

  Well, just off the coast of Vietnam.

• 49:25Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 49:25Michael Stevens?

  In the South China Sea.

• 49:26Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 49:27Michael Stevens?

  It's between Vietnam and the, the Chinese province of Hainan.

• 49:34Hannah Fry?

  Which is the same distance as here to New Zealand, I mean, if you're in London.

• 49:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, more or less. I think, I think New Zealand's true antipode is like in Spain. But yeah, like Spain and New Zealand, Europe and New Zealand, antipodal, but also the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, antipodal, right? Like, that's incredible. I knew it was big. I knew that there's a water hemisphere on earth where you can look at, you could look at the earth and see nothing but ocean, the Pacific Ocean. But that's so large that there are two points on it that are on opposite sides. You float a piece of bread just in the armpit of South America, you float one in the Gulf of Tonkin, you've made an earth sandwich that's really wet.

• 50:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Yeah, my daughter was saying the other day about how she had learned this fact that the earth is seventy percent water on the surface of it.

• 50:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Hannah Fry?

  And, um, and I was like, you know what? You're right. Thirty percent land is really isn't very much, is it? It's really not very much.

• 50:32Michael Stevens?

  No, it's not very much.

• 50:33Hannah Fry?

  Have you seen the map of a map of the world, but from the perspective of the ocean?

• 50:38Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:40Hannah Fry?

  The map of the world if you're a fish.

• 50:42Michael Stevens?

  It's, yeah, it's like the fish's map of the world. And you've got these like borders and then like mysterious, we don't know what's there for the land. But it's cool because usually we're happy to cut the oceans up when we make map projections. But for the fish, they would just cut up the land because who cares?

• 50:59Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 50:59Michael Stevens?

  They want the ocean. Yeah. And you realize that we just have this one big global ocean and there happened to be some islands in it. But we give them different names. We say, well, that's the Atlantic and that's the Indian Ocean. It's like, well, where's the line between them? Because it looks like a whole bunch of water the whole way.

• 51:14Hannah Fry?

  Tell you what, though, sundials would be useless on Lahaina noon, wouldn't they?

• 51:18Michael Stevens?

  That's right. They would cast no shadow. The gomon would just, well, there'd be no shadow on it. You'd be like, well, you'd say, I don't know what time it is. So it's probably Lahaina noon. It must be that once every year noon.

• 51:30Hannah Fry?

  But you know what? Everyone's gonna be late that day. No one's gonna, no one's gonna have any idea.

• 51:35Michael Stevens?

  Well, yeah, because as soon as it's like fifteen past noon, the shadow that the gomon creates is gonna be just like a little sludge. It's gonna barely reach any numbers. No one's gonna know. It's gonna be a huge mess.

• 51:46Hannah Fry?

  Disaster. Disaster.

• 51:49Michael Stevens?

  Thank goodness we don't experience it where we live.

• 51:51Hannah Fry?

  Thank good. Do you know what? Suddenly I take it all back. This, this northern, this northern latitude, I'm, I'm fine with it after all. No.

• 52:00Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Hannah Fry?

  Maybe that's, maybe that's why we got so much done. Everyone was on time.

• 52:04Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, they had to make clocks because the sun was just too variable.

• 52:08Hannah Fry?

  I mean, we can't also see the sun here. So there's, there's also that. But separate points, separate points, too gray and cloudy, but don't worry about that. Right. Well, I think we've, I think we've learned a lot this episode. Um, we've learned, well, I'm suddenly very anti-sundial now, if I'm honest with you. I've completely changed position.

• 52:22Michael Stevens?

  Started with that, but we didn't really end anywhere. I mean, I ended with sundials. I was kind of against them, but I think that they can be made to work, except there's one other problem we haven't discussed, and that is clouds.

• 52:33Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Michael Stevens?

  And Earth's shadow, also known as nighttime. Whoops. There are lunar sundials, lunar dials. Um, but again, they only work when the sun, when the moon is bright enough and there aren't clouds in the sky. And the moon is up, right? I mean, the moon doesn't just come up because the sun's down. It's up all the time when it wants to.

• 52:53Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 52:53Michael Stevens?

  And so, you know, sometimes you gotta just live by feel. What time does it feel like? You know? Don't let other people tell you what time it is. The earth's telling you one thing, society's telling you another. You can't rely on yourself.

• 53:08Hannah Fry?

  You know what? This is, it's all nonsense. It's all, everything is nonsense apart from this podcast.

• 53:13Michael Stevens?

  So thanks for listening.

• 53:14Hannah Fry?

  We will be back later this week with an episode of Field Notes. Until then, goodbye.

• 53:20Michael Stevens?

  Aloha.

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