Why you notice daylight saving changing less and less

When Tasmania became the first state to put the clocks forward in the summer 59 years ago, not everyone was happy.

“Forget God’s time,” one person wrote on an ABC program about daylight saving time in 1970.

“If God wanted us to wake up in the dark, he would give us cat eyes to help us do it more satisfactorily,” said another.

Today, daylight saving time may be barely noticeable thanks to the unerring accuracy of our smartphone clocks, which will diligently repeat an hour as states revert to standard time on Easter Sunday.

But deep inside a sprawling laboratory complex in Sydney’s densely forested landscape, Australia’s chief time scientist, Michael Wouters, is involved in the trillion-dollar global task of keeping time accurate with atomic clocks.

Instead of a pendulum, they blast these cesium atoms with microwaves more than nine billion times per second.

A luxury wristwatch might set you back ten thousand dollars, but these machines cost $140,000 each.

“They’re not that expensive considering their lifespan,” Dr Wouters told AAP.

There is no central world time, which means that coordinated universal time (UTC) (the global standard) is the average of hundreds of atomic clocks in government laboratories.

Their time is published with the help of people like Harlan Stenn, who mostly single-handedly runs open-source software that distributes time to computers from his spare bedroom in Oregon.

Mr. Stenn can barely be heard above the six-foot rack of computers buzzing and towering above his desk.

“You won’t believe my electricity bill,” he told AAP.

In California, Australian-born Kim Davies helps oversee Dr Wouters’ time zone database, which converts UTC to more than 300 local differences.

“(The system) is remarkable because it is unremarkable,” he told AAP.

“It’s quiet and automatic; that’s what interests him most.”

He says governments aren’t always proactive in reporting time zone changes, including daylight saving time, while people’s unpredictability sometimes confuses computers.

“Time zone policy was determined by very human things,” he says.

Airlines, banks, telecommunications operators and manufacturers of precisely calibrated measuring devices also require atomic time, which jumps only every 100 million years.

Still, there is a market for better watches.

“There are about 400 clocks that contribute to UTC… ours are very ordinary,” says Dr Wouters.

“There are new clocks that are about 100 to 1000 times better.”

Time is constantly moving forward, but these clocks, which are more than 20 years old and use 1950s technology, are also monuments to the fact that time has stood still.

Even the furniture at the National Measurement Institute, where Dr Wouters worked for 29 years, looks as if it were frozen in the 1970s; The complex itself is a retro brutalist icon.

And according to Dr Wouters, all these years are still not enough for scientists to decide what time actually is.

“This is one of those things that physicists don’t quite agree on,” he told AAP.

He will not get caught up in this thorny issue, nor will he be content with tampering with the system that keeps modern life harmonious.

Thanks to him, the Stenn software, and the Davies database, the need to adjust the watch twice a year has become an intermittent annoyance for the few people who wear analog wrists.

You won’t see time ticking on the wrist of Australia’s chief timekeeper.

“Not having a watch is a matter of dignity in standards of time and frequency,” Dr Wouters said.

When the atomic clock is not in sight, he checks the time on his phone.

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