On Thursday, October 26, 2017 at 7:12:08 AM UTC-6, Gerald Kelleher wrote:

This is a foolish statement, the 'Equation of Time' is a timekeeping
facility that only works within the calendar framework so before the
theorists so running after a notion that 'clocks measure' time, the job
of a clock is merely to maintain a constant pace in terms of the AM/PM
cycle or its subdivisions of hours,minutes and seconds.

This nicely sums up *precisely* where you have gone wrong.

Time is a fundamental property of the whole Universe.

So it doesn't speed up or slow down because of the details of the motion
of one little planet going around one little star.

You seem to think that the *time of day* is time itself. Which is simply silly; if you go east by 15 degrees of longitude, the time of day is an hour later - but at the same moment of time.

What clocks measure, which advances at a uniform pace, is what is useful
for telling how long it takes to bake a cake... or how long it takes for
crystals to dissolve... or how long it takes for an oscillation
generated by an inductor-capacitor network to complete.

And it is precisely because that is time itself, whereas the time of day
is simply an accident of location, that the rotational period of the
Earth is not a complete cycle of the time of day, but instead a rotation
of the kind that is uniform within true time - the so-called "sidereal
day".

John Savard