[Avodah] Molad Alert: Friday night

[Zev Sero]

On 7/03/2011 5:49 PM, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:

> Standard Time and Railroad Time are not the same thing. Standard Time
> is the new-fangled artificial stuff based on "Time Zones" that the
> revenooers forced upon us in the mid-to-late 1800s.

Nope, it was the railroads that done it.

> Solar Time (also called Local Time) is the old-fashioned natural time,
>  by which each clock is set to have 12:00 Noon at midday

Not exactly.  12:00 is the *mean* noon, "chatzos ho'emtzo`i", and does
not vary from day to day.  Thus it can be calculated directly from the
longitude.  Actual noon on any one day can be +/- about 15 minutes, but
by the same amount everywhere in the world.


> Railroad Time was a mess, caused by railroads whose clocks were set
> according to the Local Time of some point on its route, ignoring the
> clocks of the towns elsewhere on its route, and also ignoring the
> clocks of the other trains it would meet with (or crash into).

No, that was the mess *before* Railroad Time, and is what caused the
railroads to get together and eventually implement Railroad Time, which
we now call Standard Time.  They didn't actually force anyone else to
adopt it, but if you wanted to catch a train and your clock was on your
local time, you'd better be aware of the difference.  Most people found
this was more trouble than it was worth, so they adjusted their clocks
to match the railroads'.


> Much info on this is can be found at
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone and elsewhere.

Indeed.  Particularly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time
Where I just learned something I didn't know before: that in France,
from 1891 to 1911, the law required clocks inside railway stations
(which governed what time the trains actually left) to be set five
minutes behind, so people who came late would still catch their trains.
The clocks *outside* the stations had to show the correct time, but
as soon as you set foot inside the station you moved back five minutes.
I'd bet, though, that this didn't work; people being people would just
add five minutes to whatever the timetable said, and take it into
account.


> But, to answer the question: When the Molad is announced, it is
> according to a system that does not use the time zones which we have
> today.

Exactly.  It uses Jerusalem Mean Time, not an artificial time that
goyishe geographers have imposed for international convenience.


> And most people are unaware of that fact.

Most people have no idea what a "molad" is anyway.  But if you want
to know, e.g., whether the molad will be zaken, then you need to know
it in JMT, not GMT+2.

  
> For example, if the molad is announced as being "at exactly 10 AM
> on Sunday", there will be people in New York who will look at their
> wristwatch, see that it says "10:00", and they'll think to themselves,
> "That's exactly 24 hours from now," but they'll be wrong. There will
> also be people in New York who think, "Yerushalayim is 7 hours ahead
> of us, so the molad will be in exactly 17 hours," but they'll be wrong
> too. There will also be people in Yerushalayim who hear the same
> announcement, and see "10:00" on their watches, and they will say,
> "That's 24 hours away," but even they will be mistaken.

But of what use is that information?


> (Of course, as other posters have mentioned, it's not the *real*
> molad anyway, just the *calculated* molad.

Exactly.  And this is the scale on which it's calculated.


> And, for the nit-pickers: More precise calculations would show a
> 19-minute difference, as opposed to 20.

Huh?  Surely it's nearly 21 minutes.  19 minutes, at J'm's latitude,
would put you somewhere near Gedera.


-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                      - Margaret Thatcher