Roy Exum
Peter Whibberley, known globally as “The Time Lord,” will freely tell anyone, “There are consequences of tinkering with time,” but tinker we must because the world – planet Earth -- is spinning slower. So tonight at 7:59:60 p.m. EDT, the Senior Research Scientist at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory will add an extra second to the hour – and our day -- before it becomes 8:00 p.m. That’s right, 7:59 p.m. will have 61 seconds!
I have wondered how to do it on my wrist watch, too, but this “leap second,” similar in kind to our “leap year” every four years, will allow planet Earth to catch up with atomic time. The trouble is the “extra second” plays havoc with computers and communication systems. When it was last done in 2012, operating systems like Mozilla, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn and StumpleUpon all crashed. In Australia more than 400 Qantas flights were grounded because the precision check-in system also went looney.
From what I can understand, atomic time is constant. Rory McEvoy, the Curator of Horology (!) at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, explained, “Since antiquity (think “the beginning”) the Earth’s rotation has provided us with our timescale. It is the earth’s rotation that gives us the most basic unit of time – the solar day.”
McEvoy also said the Earth’s speed of rotation has a tendency to slow, which is caused principally because of the relationship between Earth and the Moon, but it can also speed up. “There is a possibility that a negative ‘leap second’ could be utilized too.”
Until the middle of the 19th century, English cities were allowed to keep their own time, but when a five-minute disparity was found between the cities of London and Bristol, Greenwich Mean Time and larger time zones were created. Why? Different times were causing the railroad to have fits and it was even worst for the telegraph operators.
Scientists at the International Earth Rotation Service in Paris are now tasked to monitor the planets and call for a time “tweak” whenever necessary. The first was done in 1972 and – believe it or not – tonight’s extra second will be the 26th time in history that it has been done. In other words, the Earth has slowed 26 seconds in approximately the last 45 years.
Another way some skeptics look at it is that this never happened until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed a space ship on the Moon July 20, 1969, and then went stomping around the next day. Personally, I don’t believe that, but it sure makes the story more fun.
For the purists, the “leap second” is being added to Universal Coordinated Time, or UTC as it is known everywhere in the world but Chattanooga, in Greenwich, England, tonight at 11:59:60 - the final tick of the month of June. The USA’s Eastern Standard Time is three hours behind UTC time, and before you say “four” kindly remember “daylight savings time” is a government invention.
Why do we even bother with a “leap second”? Just this: while it would take centuries for the common eye to detect Earth’s rotation has slowed 26 seconds since astronaut Armstrong dusted his boots, astronomers and navigators who rely on conventional positions of the stars and planets would get messed up. There is a big World Radiocommunication Conference that will be held for most of the month of November this year in Geneva, Switzerland and there is already a dispute arising.
The United States, saying “leap seconds” are too disruptive to sophisticated computer systems, communication grids, and sensitive navigation devices, wants to scuttle the “extra second” plan, but Britain says if we do not tweak the clock every now and then, it would forever snap the link between our concept of time and the daily path of the sun as it relates to Earth.
Whibberley, the “Time Lord,” explained most computers utilize Network Time Protocol (NTP) and since “leap seconds” occur sporadically, “it is difficult to implement (the extra second) into the world’s computers, and mistakes can cause systems to fail temporarily.”
The computers crash because they are programmed to know 20:00 (on a 24-hour clock) is one second after 19:59:59 in Chattanooga. By adding the extra second, the computer doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s why NASDAQ and a number of other huge systems are going dark tonight at 7:58 p.m.
Daniel MacMillan of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, explained there are 86,400 seconds in a day but because the Earth, the Sun and Moon are “in a gravitational tug-of-war,” the average length of a day right now is scientifically 86,400.002 seconds.
So I ask once more, how do I set my watch’s second hand where it will go .002 seconds faster than it normally does?
royexum@aol.com