Why is one day 23 hours and 56 minutes?

Wait, what?! A day isn’t actually 24 hours long? It’s more like 23 hours and 56 minutes? Mind. Blown. Seriously, that messes with my head a little bit. I mean, my whole life I’ve thought a day was 24 hours! Then where do those extra four minutes come from? It’s because of our trip around the sun, right? We’re not just spinning like a top, we’re also whizzing around a giant star. So a sidereal day – that’s the actual spin time – is that shorter time. But because we’re also orbiting, we have to spin a little extra each day to catch up to the sun again, so our solar day ends up being 24 hours. Think of it like this: imagine running on a track and trying to keep pace with someone slightly ahead of you. You have to run a little further to stay aligned, right? It’s kind of the same with the Earth and the sun! Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What even is time, if it can be like this? I remember learning about leap years in elementary school, and even that blew my mind. Now this? This is next level. It makes the whole concept of time feel almost…personal? Subjective? Like, whose time is it anyway? Crazy, right?