Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Notice the "near": the 0° meridian no longe passes through the transit instrument there.
Steve and Richard have replied with their usual level of precision. We risk getting lost in the details.
I might just remind folks that one arc second corresponds to 30 meters on the surface of the Earth. At the equator, that means that one second of time corresponds to 450 meters. (280m at the latitude of Greenwich.) It is the ITU that is seeking to move the prime meridian, by about two-tenths of a mile per year at the equator (accelerating quadratically).
We've had this discussion before. What might be different this time is that presumably there must now be some plan among the proponents of the ITU proposal to deal with the obvious and completely unacceptable implications. Or is there?
Of the several rather absurd options it appears the one the ITU has selected, perhaps implicitly, is to throw Greenwich Mean Time under the bus.
I won't belabor in this message why that is not likely to happen in practice. But again - there are indeed two different kinds of time, and if you suppress one kind in one place, it will always pop up again somewhere else.
In any event, a policy for dealing with the prime meridian should appear in the ITU proposal. If you think this is a non-issue, it should be easy to describe, right?
And what precisely does the ITU propose to do should the UK not accept this plan? We've been gleefully informed that people persist in identifying UTC with GMT. We've been told that GMT is nothing more than the timezone of Greenwich. We've also been told that the intercalary corrections will be managed purely by local authorities messing with their timezones. What if local authorities have different ideas about the appropriateness of this?
Greenwich Mean Time is (and will be) reified by nature. UTC is currently reified by GMT. The ITU seeks to wrench the two definitions apart, but is implicitly insisting that they remain the same so that the Greenwich timezone can participate in the inevitable intercalary adjustments.
The ITU's biggest argument is with itself. Rob _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
