Governor Rick Scott Signs New Law to Move the Sun
“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.” - Galileo Galilei
On March 23, 2018, Governor Rick Scott approved House Bill 1013, known as the Sunshine Protection Act, which lawmakers believe will have a positive impact on the State’s economy and tourism because there will be more daylight hours in each day, all year round. Hopefully, in November 2018 when we are closing in on the shorts days of the year, Florida residents will no longer have to set clocks back by one hour, thereby losing an additional hour of daylight.
The Act begins by cleverly stating: “the State of Florida is known as the ‘Sunshine State,’ and as the ‘Sunshine State,’ Florida should be kept sunny year-round.” The Act will become effective on July 1, 2018.
However, despite both the Florida Legislature and Governor Scott agreeing on the time change, final approval is dependent upon an amendment to Title 15 § 260a of the U.S. Code by Congress. Section 260a states that from March to November of each year the Standard Time of each time zone must be advanced by one hour, which is known as Daylight Savings Time.
Importantly, Section 260a only allows states to exempt themselves from Daylight Savings Time, which would allow them to use Standard Time all year. However, Section 260a does not allow states to exempt themselves from Standard Time, as Florida is attempting to do.
In hopes of making this a reality, Senator Marco Rubio also introduced a bill that would amend Section 260a so that all states can elect to operate on Daylight Savings Time.
Congress, let there be light!
Daylight saving time (abbreviated DST), sometimes referred to as daylight savings time in US, Canadian and Australian speech, and known as British Summer Time (BST) in the UK and just summer time in some countries, is the practice of advancing clocks during summer months so that evening daylight lasts longer, while sacrificing normal sunrise times. Typically, regions that use daylight saving time adjust clocks forward one hour close to the start of spring and adjust them backward in the autumn to standard time.
Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian polymath. Galileo is a central figure in the transition from natural philosophy to modern science and in the transformation of the scientific Renaissance into a scientific revolution. Galileo's championing of helio-centrism and Copernicanism was controversial during his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geo-centrism or the Tychonic system. He met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted helio-centrism because of the absence of an observed stellar parallax.[4] The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that helio-centrism was "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture." Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point.[4] He was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. While under house arrest, he wrote one of his best-known works, Two New Sciences, in which he summarized work he had done some forty years earlier on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials. Information gathered from Wikipedia