Tonight, at 11:48 PM Eastern Time, is the moment of the winter solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere is pointed as far away from the Sun as it ever gets. It will be the longest night of the year, and tomorrow will be the day with the fewest hours of sunlight.
Extreme cold froze parts of Turkey's Muradiye Falls earlier this month.Getty ImagesAs most people know, this marks the official beginning of winter. It's one of the familiar features of the end of the year, like reports of holiday sales and box-office receipts—a reliable news story for a time when many offices and schools are winding down and news tends to be in short supply.
At first, the rationale for beginning winter tonight seems quite natural. What could be more reasonable than basing the season on an astronomical event that people have been closely monitoring for thousands of years? But the assumption that this is the objective beginning of winter is an illusion—a layer of scientific precision papered over a more complicated, subjective question. And like the color on a candy cane, the layer of science doesn't go very deep.
The more you think about our common definition of…
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