Criticism
Mecca is not aligned with the North Magnetic Pole. As the geomagnetic field of the earth continuously changes the deviation of the compass needle from true north (known as the magnetic declination) also slowly changes. In the past there were epochs when the compass needle at Mecca pointed true north (and there will be future epochs when this is true again) but at the moment the line of no compass deviation is located somewhat to the southeast of Mecca. In 2012 the magnetic declination of Mecca will be 3.10° East and will continue to increase at about +0.07° per year.
The opponents say that the center of the land hemisphere is located in France, near the city of Nantes (about 4700 km from Mecca). Others argue that Nantes is just the mean of land hemisphere, which is just the land mass on the earth excluding the water hemisphere, not the whole globe.
During the 1884 International Meridian Conference, when Greenwich was established as the initial meridian, the Ottoman Empire, at that time controlling Mecca, voted with the majority for Greenwich.
The concept of Mecca Time was described as "a beautiful example of cargo cult science" by PZ Myers in reaction to the news of the building of the Mecca clock.
Read more about this topic: Mecca Time
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)