How times have changed

This last Saturday I went to Longitude 0°, Latitude 51° 28' 38'' N. Otherwise known as the Greenwich Observatory - the home of the original GMT.

With all of the technology we have today we forget just how much math goes into the world around us. That math is further driven by time (or is it time is driven by the math, ah what ever - chicken and egg).

But to see the time galleries and to understand that for a very long time sailors at sea had no way of telling time reliably. Without a proper time reference you can not figure out your longitude/latitude. Without those you are kinda lost. They still have a giant ball at the top of the building which falls at 1pm GMT daily, on the off chance you want to set a cheap watch.

Granted, that time is set by some 100 atomic clocks around the world working on UTC and is not a pair of clocks in this building. Navigation has gotten a lot easier with GPS devices.

Course, those satnav systems apparently use a definition of 0° that is a few meters off the line on the ground in Greenwich, but who's counting ...