Time too good to be true

Abstract

W wishing to cause unnecessary distress, I would like to call attention to a couple of issues concerning time. The first is merely calendraic but the second concerns the future of time itself. The first issue is that we may have to say farewell to leap seconds. Leap seconds, as you might recall, are the occasional one-second adjustments of our clocks that are made to maintain harmony between the astronomical and atomic time scales. Personally, I would be sorry to see leap seconds go because that would cost me the pleasure of mulling over the best way to spend my next one. Although a mere second might seem to be too short to cause jubilation, I believe any gift of time deserves to be treasured. Also, one second is not really that short. It is long enough to record a few million high-energy scattering events, and in femtosecond physics, one second is virtually an eternity. Also, one second is sufficient for a word or quick kiss that might change your life. The argument about whether to retain leap seconds is reminiscent of the argument about standard time versus daylight savings time: What is convenient for one community can be inconvenient for another. City dwellers generally favor daylight savings time and farmers generally oppose it. Astronomers favor leap seconds because they keep clocks in synchrony with the orientation of the Earth. Synchronization is helpful in deciding where to point telescopes and in interpreting the data in astronomical records. Celestial navigators—that vanishing breed—also like leap seconds. The Global Positioning System, however, cannot tolerate time jumps and employs a time scale that avoids leap seconds. Moreover, all large-scale systems that require precise synchronization are likely to have trouble with leap seconds. For instance, any attempt to introduce a one-second hiccup in the phasing of North American power grids would likely cause a hemispheric blackout.