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Don't lose sleep when the clocks go forward

Chris Jackson | 13:50 UK time, Friday, 25 March 2011

A view of a galaxy


To misquote : "It's all relative".

This coming weekend many of us will once again face that conundrum: "so do the clocks go forwards or backwards?"

It usually takes a few moments to figure out that - yes, we do in fact lose 60 minutes beauty sleep.

Only insomniacs will cheer. The rest of us will moan about somehow being robbed of something precious. But let's get this into perspective.

Brian Cox
I have been transfixed by Professor Brian Cox's brilliant series Wonders of the Universe.

In it he explains how out in space, time can be warped.

It has brought back memories of my days at Radio Newcastle when I interviewed an astro-physicist who manged to explain in plain English that in theory, at least, time travel is possible.

H. G. Wells dreamed up back in 1895 when the idea of being able to visit the past or future was pure fiction.

It remains only in the gift of Dr Who and the Time Lords at present, but the theory can be demonstrated.

Two synchronised atomic clocks will display precisely the same time here on earth, but send one into orbit and the two clocks will drift apart. .

.

On a day-to-day basis astronauts on the whizz round the globe so fast they witness 16 sunsets and sunrises for every one we see. There's a fascinating video on how they set their watches on a special 91Èȱ¬ webpage all about time.

Compared to the universal picture, an hour lost is neither here nor there.

So bringing it all back down to earth, what will I miss this weekend? Sixty extra minutes of reading the Sunday papers, perhaps? A nice long soak in the bath? I can live with that.

Best of all my cats don't know what's coming. Instead of them stirring at the crack of dawn to harass me into getting up to feed them, this time round I get a head start and will throw them out of their little beds for a change.

You see - it's not all bad.

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