Remember Douglas Engelbart? Apart from the famous "mother of all demos" there was his philosophy which loosely says that technology should help boost IQ not subvert or replace it, as has largely happened.

We have the technology for every individual to keep personalised local time, just like we used to with sundials and local time for every village - midday is when the sun is at its highest for me. And we have the technology to make that work and do all the coordination stuff. It just involves some good hard analysis to work it all out to make it work. All of your undoubted objections are just a list of things to analyse and work out. It ca be done!

And imagine the continuous wave of new year's eve fireworks around the globe.

Whatever abstraction you use ... the marketing guys' next project will break it.

Roger Penrose: The Road to Reality
Shows you how lots of that maths, even the abstract stuff, applies to trying to describe the universe. And ponders right from the start on why you are doing it.