Leap Seconds

I have a fascination with time that many feel is overly obsessive. There is a natural rhythm to the Universe and it is easy enough to adjust our clocks and calendars to keep in sync with it. When I was a child, it was quite normal to have wind-up clocks that drifted several minutes in a week. The phone company had a number you could call to obtain the correct time so that everyone could keep their clocks in sync with each other. When I was 10, Santa Claus gave me a Hallicrafters shortwave radio:

My parents let me string an antenna wire across the back yard and down the side yard which allowed me to pull in stations from around the world. One of which was WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado, which provided a time signal synchronized to Coordinated Universal Time (the descendants of this station are used by the ubiquitous "atomic" clocks that stay synchronized automatically).

When I was 12, Santa Claus gave me a Seiko watch that had an adjustable movement. Over the next year I tweaked it ever so slightly until it could stay in sync with the UTC time signal for almost a month before it drifted off by a second. When I was 16, I built a digital clock/calendar with 8-segment LED displays built with some mail-order components from Digi-Key. It used the (US) 60 Hz AC line frequency to maintain its synchronization, but it, too, would have to be manually synchronized back to WWV periodically.

The Universe moves in a precisely defined manner that trickles down to our Solar System. The Earth revolves on its axis while it orbits the sun which orbits the center of the Milky Way every 240 million years (or so).

From the dawn of Man's desire to track the days and nights and seasons and tides, the underlying goal has always been to accurately track the movement of the heavens. Now that Man has achieved the ability to do so in the most accurate way possible, I find it ironic there is now a movement to abandon this Universal time and ignore it from now on.

Our society has become so dependent on accurate time-keeping that a change of only one second can wreak havoc with computer servers and GPS satellite systems. On June 30, 2015, at 23:59:59 UTC, the next second will be 23:59:60 instead of 00:00:00 (which will still follow one second later). This is needed to insure that the primary mandate of aligning Man's time-keeping to the Universe is followed. The fact that almost all time-sensitive systems will globally have to hiccup in lock-step, however, presents a logistical nightmare for many system administrators. It would be so much easier to just ignore the Universe and start using Man's "better" system, but would easier be the correct approach to something as important as time?

I have always taken great comfort in knowing that my timepieces are all in lock-step with the rest of the Universe. Without the leap seconds that have been added since 1972, my watch would be 25 seconds too fast, which is way too upsetting to even think about. The thought of it being off by a whole minute in another 50 years or so is positively unbearable (okay, so maybe my relationship with time is more obsession than fascination).

A couple of years ago I was worried sick that the powers-that-be would decide to just ignore the leap seconds and drift farther and farther away from the natural order of things. But they did the Right Thing and they will do it once more in June. Hopefully, when the issue comes up again in another few years, cooler minds will continue to prevail.