"Why Scientists Want to Shorten the Minute to 59 Seconds" https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35165130/leap-second-shorten-minut... (As noted on Twitter by Molly Conger, @socialistdogmom.) @dashdashado
Is there any reason to believe that story is more than fiction? paul On Jan 11, 2021, at 8:29 PM, Arthur David Olson <arthurdavidolson@gmail.com<mailto:arthurdavidolson@gmail.com>> wrote: [EXTERNAL EMAIL] "Why Scientists Want to Shorten the Minute to 59 Seconds" https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35165130/leap-second-shorten-minut... (As noted on Twitter by Molly Conger, @socialistdogmom.) @dashdashado
On Tue 2021-01-12T14:34:52+0000 Koning, Paul hath writ:
Is there any reason to believe that story is more than fiction?
"Why Scientists Want to Shorten the Minute to 59 Seconds"
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35165130/leap-second-shorten-minut...
No, but it is a common fiction that has arisen because the content of the negotiations that led to the inception of leap seconds was not explained. At the time of inception no scientist believed that leap seconds were the best way to regulate time. The closest that they could come at IAU was to assert that leap seconds were the "optimum solution" while redacting all of the arguments and discussion indicating that the problem that needed a solution was legal and political, not technical. -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
On Jan 12, 2021, at 9:48 AM, Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> wrote:
[EXTERNAL EMAIL]
On Tue 2021-01-12T14:34:52+0000 Koning, Paul hath writ:
Is there any reason to believe that story is more than fiction?
"Why Scientists Want to Shorten the Minute to 59 Seconds"
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35165130/leap-second-shorten-minut...
No, but it is a common fiction that has arisen because the content of the negotiations that led to the inception of leap seconds was not explained.
At the time of inception no scientist believed that leap seconds were the best way to regulate time. The closest that they could come at IAU was to assert that leap seconds were the "optimum solution" while redacting all of the arguments and discussion indicating that the problem that needed a solution was legal and political, not technical.
-- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
Yes. The other point, though, is that leap seconds lengthen the day. In theory we can have omitted seconds, in practice we have not had those. The article speaks of the days getting shorter. Is there any data that supports this assertion? paul
There were a number of articles about a week ago with some details about the amount by which the earth is spinning faster. One such is: https://www.space.com/earth-spinning-faster-negative-leap-second.html It says, in part: The year 2020 was already faster than usual, astronomically speaking (cue
sighs of relief). According to Time and Date, Earth broke the previous record for shortest astronomical day, set in 2005, 28 times. That year's shortest day, July 5, saw Earth complete a rotation 1.0516 milliseconds faster than 86,400 seconds. The shortest day in 2020 was July 19, when the planet completed one spin 1.4602 milliseconds faster than 86,400 seconds.
That appears to be a report from Live Science — I've not tracked down the original. On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 7:57 AM Koning, Paul <Paul.Koning@dell.com> wrote:
On Jan 12, 2021, at 9:48 AM, Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> wrote:
[EXTERNAL EMAIL]
On Tue 2021-01-12T14:34:52+0000 Koning, Paul hath writ:
Is there any reason to believe that story is more than fiction?
"Why Scientists Want to Shorten the Minute to 59 Seconds"
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35165130/leap-second-shorten-minut...
No, but it is a common fiction that has arisen because the content of the negotiations that led to the inception of leap seconds was not explained.
At the time of inception no scientist believed that leap seconds were the best way to regulate time. The closest that they could come at IAU was to assert that leap seconds were the "optimum solution" while redacting all of the arguments and discussion indicating that the problem that needed a solution was legal and political, not technical.
-- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
Yes. The other point, though, is that leap seconds lengthen the day. In theory we can have omitted seconds, in practice we have not had those. The article speaks of the days getting shorter. Is there any data that supports this assertion?
paul
-- Jonathan Leffler <jonathan.leffler@gmail.com> #include <disclaimer.h> Guardian of DBD::Informix - v2018.1031 - http://dbi.perl.org "Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused."
On Tue 2021-01-12T08:09:58-0700 Jonathan Leffler hath writ:
There were a number of articles about a week ago with some details about the amount by which the earth is spinning faster.
One such is: https://www.space.com/earth-spinning-faster-negative-leap-second.html
That appears to be a report from Live Science — I've not tracked down the original.
On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 7:57 AM Koning, Paul <Paul.Koning@dell.com> wrote:
Yes. The other point, though, is that leap seconds lengthen the day. In theory we can have omitted seconds, in practice we have not had those. The article speaks of the days getting shorter. Is there any data that supports this assertion?
Apologies, I forget that not everyone is running weekly cron jobs that interrogate the ongoing publications of IERS bureaus in order to track earth rotation. It has been faster during 2020, but not enough that a negative leap second looks likely. Still, predicting the weather in the earth's core is hard, so it is not impossible. The original impetus for the articles was almost certainly Time and Date dot com who have been running an ongoing page of the IERS numbers with sports statistics about how fast the earth is rotating. See https://www.timeanddate.com/time/earth-rotation.html and their year end summary at https://www.timeanddate.com/time/earth-faster-rotation.html It looks like a reporter for a UK newspaper picked up on that and interviewed Peter Whibberley of NPL in order to start the sequence of bots reproducing the original and other reporters rephrasing. -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
On 2021-01-12 09:41, Steve Allen wrote:
On Tue 2021-01-12T08:09:58-0700 Jonathan Leffler hath writ:
There were a number of articles about a week ago with some details about the amount by which the earth is spinning faster.
One such is: https://www.space.com/earth-spinning-faster-negative-leap-second.html
That appears to be a report from Live Science — I've not tracked down the original.
On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 7:57 AM Koning, Paul <Paul.Koning@dell.com> wrote:
Yes. The other point, though, is that leap seconds lengthen the day. In theory we can have omitted seconds, in practice we have not had those. The article speaks of the days getting shorter. Is there any data that supports this assertion?
Apologies, I forget that not everyone is running weekly cron jobs that interrogate the ongoing publications of IERS bureaus in order to track earth rotation. It has been faster during 2020, but not enough that a negative leap second looks likely. Still, predicting the weather in the earth's core is hard, so it is not impossible.
The original impetus for the articles was almost certainly Time and Date dot com who have been running an ongoing page of the IERS numbers with sports statistics about how fast the earth is rotating. See https://www.timeanddate.com/time/earth-rotation.html and their year end summary at https://www.timeanddate.com/time/earth-faster-rotation.html
It looks like a reporter for a UK newspaper picked up on that and interviewed Peter Whibberley of NPL in order to start the sequence of bots reproducing the original and other reporters rephrasing.
Not too unusual as the last long gap was 7 years between 1999 Jan and 2006 Jan. One problem may have been that the last leap second was declared when dUT1 was changing rapidly but 6 months later had reached only about -0.4 in 2017 Jan, when the leap second flipped it to about +0.5, dUT1 kept going down to -0.1 around 2019 Mar, and it's wobbled between that and -0.25 since then; see: https://datacenter.iers.org/data/latestVersion/224_EOP_C04_14.62-NOW.IAU2000... and predicted to stay around there for the next year at least: https://datacenter.iers.org/data/latestVersion/6_BULLETIN_A_V2013_016.txt when it will be only 5 years since the last leap second: long enough for some people to start forgetting again about accounting for leap seconds in timekeeping code, so that more systems may have issues the next time a leap second is added; cue comp.risks/risks@csl.sri.com. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada This email may be disturbing to some readers as it contains too much technical detail. Reader discretion is advised. [Data in binary units and prefixes, physical quantities in SI.]
On 2021-01-12 10:26:03, Brian Inglis wrote:
One problem may have been that the last leap second was declared when dUT1 was changing rapidly but 6 months later had reached only about -0.4 in 2017 Jan, when the leap second flipped it to about +0.5, dUT1 kept going down to -0.1 around 2019 Mar, and it's wobbled between that and -0.25 since then; see:
https://datacenter.iers.org/data/latestVersion/224_EOP_C04_14.62-NOW.IAU2000...
This looks like a very interesting table to study. Could you point me to a document that describes the column values, or maybe give a brief description of the column abbreviations? I might create a project out of this on Gitlab with SQLite and scripts to visualize the data. Thanks for the interesting link, Øyvind N 60.376° E 5.3334° OpenPGP fingerprint: A006 05D6 E676 B319 55E2 E77E FB0C BEE8 94A5 06E5 03b4eec4-551b-11eb-971f-5582e081d110
On Tue 2021-01-12T22:14:42+0100 Øyvind A. Holm hath writ:
On 2021-01-12 10:26:03, Brian Inglis wrote:
https://datacenter.iers.org/data/latestVersion/224_EOP_C04_14.62-NOW.IAU2000...
This looks like a very interesting table to study. Could you point me to a document that describes the column values, or maybe give a brief description of the column abbreviations? I might create a project out of this on Gitlab with SQLite and scripts to visualize the data.
This is the source of those data https://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/index.php?index=C04&lang=en Those web pages can generate plots, within limits. (IERS does not have unlimited resources.) -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
On 2021-01-12 4:14 PM, Øyvind A. Holm wrote:
On 2021-01-12 10:26:03, Brian Inglis wrote:
One problem may have been that the last leap second was declared when dUT1 was changing rapidly but 6 months later had reached only about -0.4 in 2017 Jan, when the leap second flipped it to about +0.5, dUT1 kept going down to -0.1 around 2019 Mar, and it's wobbled between that and -0.25 since then; see:
https://datacenter.iers.org/data/latestVersion/224_EOP_C04_14.62-NOW.IAU2000... This looks like a very interesting table to study. Could you point me to a document that describes the column values, or maybe give a brief description of the column abbreviations? I might create a project out of this on Gitlab with SQLite and scripts to visualize the data.
Thanks for the interesting link, Øyvind
N 60.376° E 5.3334° OpenPGP fingerprint: A006 05D6 E676 B319 55E2 E77E FB0C BEE8 94A5 06E5 03b4eec4-551b-11eb-971f-5582e081d110
Combined solution C04 for Earth Rotation Parameters consistent with International Terrestrial Reference Frame 2014 https://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/eop/eopc04/C04.guide.pdf
The Telegraph appears to have had one of the earliest posts on this topic this time around… https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/04/earth-spinning-faster-now-time-p... …and, from there, it was quickly picked up by The New York Post: https://nypost.com/2021/01/05/atomic-clock-scientists-suggest-subtracting-a-... It's amazing how quickly "fastest in 50 years" becomes "faster than maybe ever" in popular media. ;) On 2020-01-01, DUT1 (per the IERS Rapid Service in Bulletins A) was −0.177278, while a year later on 2021-01-01 it was nearly the same at −0.175360. This is a bit unexpected: In January 2020, predictions for January 2021 were much closer to −0.30, with only a slight regression between −0.24 to −0.21 along the way. In fact, we got near −0.26 in June 2020 before regressing all the way back toward −0.17 in October 2020. The projections for the year ahead indicate the accumulated difference is indeed expected to regress again from approximately −0.19 in April/May 2021 to around −0.10 in September 2021, before turning back around. Still, we've got a ways to go before DUT1 would return to positive territory — and even longer before it would start to threaten the need for a negative leap second — so while it's definitely a possibility to seriously keep in mind, I'm not too, too worried *just* yet. -- Tim Parenti On Tue, 12 Jan 2021 at 10:10, Jonathan Leffler <jonathan.leffler@gmail.com> wrote:
There were a number of articles about a week ago with some details about the amount by which the earth is spinning faster.
One such is: https://www.space.com/earth-spinning-faster-negative-leap-second.html
It says, in part:
The year 2020 was already faster than usual, astronomically speaking (cue
sighs of relief). According to Time and Date, Earth broke the previous record for shortest astronomical day, set in 2005, 28 times. That year's shortest day, July 5, saw Earth complete a rotation 1.0516 milliseconds faster than 86,400 seconds. The shortest day in 2020 was July 19, when the planet completed one spin 1.4602 milliseconds faster than 86,400 seconds.
That appears to be a report from Live Science — I've not tracked down the original.
On Tue, Jan 12, 2021 at 7:57 AM Koning, Paul <Paul.Koning@dell.com> wrote:
On Jan 12, 2021, at 9:48 AM, Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> wrote:
[EXTERNAL EMAIL]
On Tue 2021-01-12T14:34:52+0000 Koning, Paul hath writ:
Is there any reason to believe that story is more than fiction?
"Why Scientists Want to Shorten the Minute to 59 Seconds"
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35165130/leap-second-shorten-minut...
No, but it is a common fiction that has arisen because the content of the negotiations that led to the inception of leap seconds was not explained.
At the time of inception no scientist believed that leap seconds were the best way to regulate time. The closest that they could come at IAU was to assert that leap seconds were the "optimum solution" while redacting all of the arguments and discussion indicating that the problem that needed a solution was legal and political, not technical.
-- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
Yes. The other point, though, is that leap seconds lengthen the day. In theory we can have omitted seconds, in practice we have not had those. The article speaks of the days getting shorter. Is there any data that supports this assertion?
paul
-- Jonathan Leffler <jonathan.leffler@gmail.com> #include <disclaimer.h> Guardian of DBD::Informix - v2018.1031 - http://dbi.perl.org "Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused."
participants (8)
-
Arthur David Olson -
Brian Inglis -
Brooks Harris -
Jonathan Leffler -
Koning, Paul -
Steve Allen -
Tim Parenti -
Øyvind A. Holm