Leap Second At The End of 2005

Ruff_ilb writes "Because of the discrepency between an ephemeris second (the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time) and the second of atomic time (the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom), we're left with more than leap years. In order to ensure that the the atomic time and civil stay coordinated, "Civil time is occasionally adjusted by one second increments to ensure that the difference between a uniform time scale defined by atomic clocks does not differ from the Earth's rotational time by more than 0.9 seconds."" And Happy New Years everyone ;)

Comments

A cool thing to do

[rolypolyman]

If you watch carefully for that leap second, you can do a freeze-frame flying kick like in The Matrix.

The hard way

[Anonymous Coward]

Adjusting the clock is of course the easy way to solve the mismatch between our ideal time and earth's rotation.

Real engineering solution would involve changing earth's rotation speed to match the clock. Any takers?

Re:The hard way

[MyLongNickName]

Adjusting the clock is of course the easy way to solve the mismatch between our ideal time and earth's rotation

Oh yeah? It took me about ten minutes to adjust all the clocks in my house due to the damn leap second. Multiply this by the 100 million households in the nation, and we have a very serious issue here.

I demand that George Bush pull us out of whatever God forsaken U.N. treaty that got us into this mess.

old news

[Viriatus]

Old news, from last year.