World time
The measurement of time is so critical to the functioning of modern societies that it is coordinated at an international level. The basis for scientific time is a continuous count of seconds based on atomic clocks around the world, known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). This is the yardstick for other time scales, including Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is the basis for civil time.
Earth is split up into a number of time zones. Most time zones are exactly one hour apart, and by convention compute their local time as an offset from UTC or Greenwich Mean Time. In many locations these offsets vary twice yearly due to daylight saving time transitions.
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