Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
And you have repeatedly tried to ignore the question of how large the civil-solar tolerance is, can or should be.
I don't think a fair and impartial witness would say given my plethora of messages over the years that I've ever successfully ignored anything :-)
That said, a one-hour tolerance is many orders of magnitude too large, see previous threads.
But maybe part of that problem is in the moniker "civil time", which we have never fully agreed what means ?
What I mean is "the common international timescale that underlies local time worldwide for everyday purposes".
How about we operate with _three_ kinds of time and one kind of geophysics:
Certainly one geophysics - that's the point of tying the standard to physical reality rather than to racks of equipment demanding constant attention and robust interconnects forever.
There are many more than three kinds of time, but I believe previous discussions have uncovered no reason for layering the civil timekeeping standard and infrastructure on more than the two that UTC already references. There are plenty of degrees of freedom to find alternate solutions that actually address the requirements.
If any national government wants to do something stupid to human time in their country, nobody can prevent them from doing so.
Which is why underlying physical reality has to fill that role. Also, what exactly would an isolated "human time in their country" actually mean? Every day for everyone, our activities are connected to those of humans and systems in other time zones. There is one international community and there must be one common timescale.
astronomers pointing their telescopes, but do you have any other argument than that ?
As stated many times, astronomers are power users for more kinds of time (in more bizarre places) than anybody else. We certainly use both atomic and mean solar timescales.
This discussion is about civil timekeeping. Rob _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
