When will Russia switch to winter time?

   Editorial response

President of Russia Vladimir Putin  signed a law on return to winter time. In most constituent entities of the Russian Federation, the clock will be transferred an hour ago on October 26, 2014 at 2:00, and in the future, there will be no seasonal transfer of hands.

The law establishes 11 time zones in the country.

New subjects of the Russian Federation - the Republic of Crimea and the city of federal significance Sevastopol - will live according to Moscow time. The Udmurt Republic and Samara Region are included in the new time zone, which is one hour ahead of Moscow time. Since Moscow time is now in these subjects, the clock hands will not be translated there.

What are the advantages of switching to winter time?

Winter time is much closer to astronomical, natural for a person time. The fact is that it is it that is closest to the inner primordial rhythms that are in the human body. “Every person has a genetic memory, and our body remembers that we should go to bed at sunset and get up at dawn,” says Kholmogorova Galina, senior researcher, candidate of medical sciences, expert at the League of Health of the Nation. “Initially, when it was decided not to transfer time anymore, the most reasonable thing was to immediately choose winter time. But chose to install summer time, which is generally not physiological for humans, ”said the expert.

What are the cons of summer time?

Living all year round in the summertime, for six months people experience a lack of sunlight. The morning sun not only gives good mood, but also stimulates all body systems, increases working capacity and resistance to diseases. During awakening in the morning light, a person has a surge of vigor, energy, and working capacity.

Recent scientific studies have shown that if half an hour later to start classes in schools, then children have improved performance indicators, improved attention, they are easier to tolerate the morning hours.

When did you first switch to daylight saving time?

For the first time, clock hands were switched to daylight saving time in Europe during the First World War. With this measure, energy was saved. In Russia, the system of summer and winter time was introduced in 1917.

What is maternity time?

Due to the change of time in the 1930s and 1981s, the USSR began to outstrip the standard time by two hours in the summer, and by an hour in the winter. The established time acquired the name "maternity", as it was introduced by decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR.

Attempts to cancel the “maternity” time were made in 1991, but this initiative caused discontent among the population, as well as an increase in electricity consumption. The fact is that in the morning I had to get up long before sunrise, and in the evening, when people returned home from work, it was already dark. By 2009, when ex-president of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev initiated another reform of the time, about 60% of Russians lived this way.

What time is it in Russia now?

Now in Russia there is a constant summer time, which is 1-2 hours ahead of standard time. Winter time was canceled in 2011 by a decree of former President Dmitry Medvedev. However, not everyone liked this initiative. In Moscow, the central regions of the European part of Russia, Western Siberia, in the east of the Krasnoyarsk Territory and Kamchatka, time is used that is one hour ahead of standard time. In other regions, administrative time began to be ahead of the standard time by two hours.

How does the translation of arrows affect the human body?

Doctors have a negative attitude towards translating arrows, since this leads to desynchronosis, which, in turn, causes an exacerbation of diseases, including cardiovascular and mental ones. The change of regime is very difficult for some people to tolerate, sometimes a person needs a whole month to enter a new rhythm. “The best thing about the new initiative of the deputies is that they will no longer drive back and forth,” Galina Kholmogorova explained.

In addition, the mismatch of rhythms leads to various pathological phenomena in the body. A person can increase irritability, insomnia, work capacity, attention span, he feels overwhelmed, lethargic, weak, various diseases can worsen.

To always know the exact time is not enough to have a good watch. We also need a standard by which this watch will be checked. For many years, such a standard served as a day - the period of the Earth's rotation around its axis - and a second - 1/86400 a fraction of the day. The period of the Earth’s rotation is constant up to one thousandth of a second, however, with the development of science and technology, even such a high accuracy has been insufficient.

In the 1950s, physicists proposed using the duration of a certain number of electromagnetic waves emitted and absorbed by atoms as a reference unit of time during the transition from one energy state to another. So there was a reference atomic clock, the second stability of which is now almost a million times higher than the stability of the Earth's rotation. The era of atomic time has begun.

The duration of the atomic second can be chosen arbitrarily, but of course, it should be close to the second specified by the rotation of the Earth. After all, we live on Earth, our life depends on its rotation in many respects, and therefore astronomical and atomic time should not noticeably diverge. If this discrepancy reaches a few fractions of a second, the atomic clock from which the known signals of the exact time are transmitted are transferred forward or backward a second to combine atomic time with astronomical time. Such transfers are allowed only twice a year - on June 30 or December 31 and they are made all over the world.

Atomic time coordinated with astronomical has received the name of universal coordinate time; at this time we live.

So far, we have been talking about time tracking systems within a day. Now we will get acquainted with the account systems of the day itself, which are called calendars.

The calendar year in which we live consists of 365 days; every fourth year is one day longer. Such a year is called a leap year.

What is a leap year for? It turns out that it is necessary to coordinate the calendar year with the solar one, which makes up the time of one revolution of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The duration of the solar, or "tropical" year, as astronomers call it, is 365.2422 days, or 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes 46 seconds.

Thus, the solar year is longer than the calendar year by about 6 hours and over 4 years this difference is almost a whole day. If this is not taken into account, the beginning of the calendar year will slowly move through the seasons and in the end it will fall from winter to summer. To prevent this from happening, a leap year is introduced.

For the first time, a 365-day calendar with one leap year was adopted in ancient Rome in 46 BC under Julius Caesar. This calendar came to be called Julian or old style.

For a long time, the Julian calendar was considered ideally accurate, but in fact this is not entirely true. Even with leap years, the Julian calendar year is 11 minutes 14 seconds shorter than the sun. It is easy to understand that in 128 years the difference between the calendar and astronomical time accounts will be a whole day.

Such an insignificant difference naturally could not play an important role for most people, but the clergy, which required the punctual execution of church holidays, were concerned about the divergence of the calendar with nature.

One of the most important religious holidays is Easter, which should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first spring full moon. The full moon was considered to be the spring full moon, coming soon after the day of the vernal equinox, i.e. March 21. But over the centuries, the vernal equinox began to slide gradually from March 21 due to the discrepancy between the calendar and the astronomical time counter. The definition of Easter day has become very complicated, confused, sometimes simply incorrect. To avoid this, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Gregory XIII, issued a special decree on calendar reform.

According to this decree, after October 4, 1582, it was necessary to count not October 5, but 15. This eliminated the error of the Julian calendar that had accumulated over the previous 12 centuries.

So that in the future this kind of error does not accumulate, it was decided from the years that end with two zeros, for example, 1600, 1700, 1800, to consider as leap years only those in which the number of hundreds is divided by 4 (1600, 2000, 2400). The rest of the centuries should be simple, while julian calendar  they were considered leap. With a new account, a calendar error in one day will accumulate in only 3300 years, which, of course, has no practical value. The new calendar system became known as the Gregorian calendar or the new style.

In fairness, I must say that our calendar is still not very convenient for life. So, if you need to determine which day of the week will be such and such a date in the current year, you must definitely look at the calendar or make calculations; for other years, this task becomes even more difficult. Months are divided into different numbers of days (30, 31, 28/29), the length of all quarters is different.

Why do we use such an inconvenient calendar, is it possible to change it? Of course you can.

A special commission has been organized at the UN to reform our calendar. Several hundred proposals on the construction of a new calendar were sent to this commission. The most interesting of them are the following two proposals:

1. A calendar year consists of 13 months of 28 days each, so that each month has exactly 4 weeks. The same dates of all months fall on the same day of the week, for example, the first day of any month will always be Monday, the second - Tuesday, etc.

Since such a year will last 364 days instead of the usual 365, after the last day of the year a special day is introduced without a number and a name - it is proposed to consider it as New Year's Day. In leap years there will be two days without a number.

Such a thirteen-month calendar has one significant drawback - the number of months that is different from our usual one. It is necessary to come up with a name for the thirteenth month and build a lifetime based on an extra month.

In neighboring Russia they are going to do this, the issue is being discussed at the highest level. If the arrows again begin to translate from neighbors, Belarus will most likely follow their example. What do experts think about this?

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Gloomy morning

One cannot but admit that there was nothing convenient in translating arrows twice a year. We did this (and residents of 75 countries of the world continue to do so) in order not to lose the evening light hours in the summer. Last October, Belarus followed Russia for the first time in almost 30 years without turning its hands an hour ago. So we stayed for the winter in the summertime. And it, as geographers explain, overtakes the astronomical one, which corresponds to natural time zones, by as much as two hours.

The most unpleasant thing is that the innovations were literally overshadowed by the already dark and cold winter days. People lost not only an hour of sleep, but more or less a bright morning. Even Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin admitted at a meeting with football fans that he was “hard to get up in the morning” and that he had already discussed the problem with Dmitry Medvedev.

This is not some kind of fetish, Putin said. - This can be returned. We will consult with the public in the broad sense of the word. If the public believes that it was better before, then it will be so.

We also decided to consult with specialists. And it turned out: among pundits, surprisingly, there is no consensus on how long we should live better - in summer or in winter.

Version 1: We are not living right now

It would be wiser to introduce year-round winter time, which is only one hour ahead of astronomical time. This difference is almost invisible to the human body. But year-round summertime adversely affects biorhythms and worsens well-being. As, however, is the seasonal clock change, ”said Semyon Rapoport, MD, professor at Moscow Medical University. THEM. Sechenov. People adapt to the time gap in different ways. At 15, a person will not even notice that the arrows have moved. And for elderly and sick people, to adapt to the new time, they need not a day or two, but weeks. Often there is an exacerbation of diseases. Another argument against year-round summer time is that there is not enough light. This is dangerous because it threatens with depression. Such a social problem has long been faced in countries such as Sweden and Norway - they have a very short daylight hours, and these countries are in the forefront of suicide. Now we live the same way they do. So, we will have the same problems.

Version 2: We live right now

We must stay in the time in which we live now. It is correct, our body has already tuned in for this time, ”said Yelena Belskaya, associate professor at the 2nd Department of Internal Medicine of the Belarusian Medical University. - Experience shows that when moving to a new time, people experience a decrease in working capacity and increased pressure. Even small children suffer.

Many say that now we are short of light. But this is not so. We do not have enough sunlight, but this is not the time to blame, but the weather. By the way, if we endlessly live in the light, then we will also begin a major depression. The body will miss melatonin - the sleep hormone.

For a long time, people do not obey the seasons and daylight saving time and vice versa - only the work schedules of offices and institutions that do not change throughout the year.

What to do?

It is necessary to discuss how long to live in winter. There are two options: move the arrows back and forth in autumn and winter or stay all year round at the same time. The completeness of daylight use is the same in both cases.