Every second counts: Australia will vote to ditch the ‘leap second’ from world’s clocks | swrighteconomy
The world’s time lords are in Paris this week making a decision that could change the very nature of time.
In terms of accuracy, pendulum clocks were superseded when Warren Marrison, working for Bell Laboratories in the United States in the 1920s, discovered that a small burst of electricity through a piece of quartz delivered a constant pulse. For most of humanity’s history, time was local. Communities had their own town clocks that set the time based on the local rise and fall of the sun. International time zones were only formalised in the 1880s.The decision to include an extra second every few years – the leap second – was made to ensure atomic and astronomic time did not get out of kilter.
The Orion capsule sitting atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket is supposed to fly within 100 kilometres of the moon’s surface. The agency needs accurate time so it can track Orion on its vital trip. Byagowi says if leap seconds were paused as planned it would take about 1000 years before there would be a noticeable gap between the relative position of the stars in the sky and atomic clock time.“For the foreseeable future, Meta engineers are supporting a larger community push to stop the future introduction of leap seconds and remain at the current level of 27, which we believe will be enough for the next millennium.”When the dinosaurs roamed the earth, they had fewer than 23 hours in a day.
Australia’s chief metrologist Bruce Warrington, who is also the chief executive of the National Measurement Institute, said from Paris that Australia would support ending the leap second.
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