[time-nuts] The future of UTC

[Steve Rooke]

Well, instead of leap seconds which seem to be the biggest bug bear
for everyone, keep the second as 1/86,400 of the earths current
rotation and adjust the factor used in the calculation of atomic time
on a regular basis. No more leap seconds just leap atomic division
factor. Unless you can try and convince the world that all this hours,
minutes and seconds thing will have to change and some new system for
defining the day with the granularity of some arbitrarily chosen
factor of atomic time (which was in line with the earth's rotation 50
years ago or so) is worked out. The day that the second was defined in
an atomic form has always meant that it bears little relationship to
the idea of a second that was held before it and is used in the real
world of wall clock time now.

Yes, I'm well aware that this causes major impracticalities for
technical and scientific users but the current system of linking
atomic time to wall time obviously has its problems. Maybe that
original linkage decision was a bad idea and the definition of the
wall clock second should go back to the astronomers.

Steve

On 15 July 2011 21:36, cook michael <michael.cook at sfr.fr> wrote:
> Le 15/07/2011 10:33, Poul-Henning Kamp a écrit :
>>
>> In message<4E1FFA88.9050400 at sfr.fr>, cook michael writes:
>>
>> Michael, there are a few details you overlook, and rather than
>> repeat myself, I'll point you at an article I wrote for Queue and
>> Communications of The ACM, trying to lay out the bits:
>>
>> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1967009
>>
> Thanks for your ref.  I am aware of the shortcomings of the present scheme
> and am not particularly pro leap second. It seems to me that the right
> questions are not being addressed and certainly the proposition for change
> as expressed and to be voted on in 2012 is premature. The US are just
> wanting leap seconds abolished without proposing alternative schemes
> covering all the requirements of time signal users.    Once they have been
> defined , recommendations can be considered.  Till then , fix the bugs.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at febo.com
> To unsubscribe, go to
> https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
> and follow the instructions there.
>



-- 
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
- Einstein