The international bureau that supervises weights and measures has decided to handle the Leap Second differently. Part of the change is driven by increasingly precise technology like GPS. Adding a second every year or so causes frequent changes and frequent errors in those systems. Instead of resetting the official clock itself every new year, they’ll simply keep track of the departure. This makes tremendous sense. We’re already tracking the departure between the annual changes, might as well just track the departure and leave the official clock alone. The exact time of noon no longer matters much since we’re not USING the sun and stars for surveying and timekeeping. We’ve been USING atomic standards for 60 years. And even when we were using the sun and stars, every measurement involved a departure, generally looked up in tables.
Here’s the BIG unexpected fact:
What’s more, Earth’s rotation has recently begun to accelerate slightly, raising the daunting possibility of needing a first-ever negative leap second.
This flips some VERY BASIC assumptions about physics. The gradual slowdown is a standard part of every physics and astronomy book. It’s deeply intuitive. Friction always wins unless you’re putting in energy and organization to fight it. The earth doesn’t experience molecular friction like a gear in a bearing, but it does experience gravitational and magnetic hysteresis, like the feel of turning a generator shaft.
If the earth is fighting friction, where is it getting the energy?
