04 November 2011
Time antici … pation
It is well known to afficionados of the Rocky Horror Show that 'time is fleeting'. The problem is that time is fleeting differently, depending upon how you measure it.
Our growing dependence upon electronic systems of all kinds is seeing us turn to atomic clocks as references. These devices rely on transitions in caesium atoms to generate a level of precision far beyond that needed.
Yet our traditional way of measuring time is the rotation of the Earth; one revolution is one day and that is split into more useful chunks.
While that's all very well, there is a divergence between the two. Caesium atom transitions are regular to a fault, but due to 'wobbles' in the Earth's rotation, the length of a day changes. Compensating for this, scientists invented the 'leap second' to put things back into alignment when the gap became too large.
Now, some countries want to get rid of the leap second. What would be the consequence? In the short term, a minuscule, but growing, disparity. Longer term, atomic and real time would become hours apart, albeit after some hundreds of years.
When the calendar changed from the Julian to the Gregorian model in 1752, there were riots because the two approaches differed. The cry went up in the streets 'give us back our 11 days'.
Will there be the same level of consternation, expressed as 'give us back our leap second'?
Author
Graham Pitcher
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