On Aug 5, 2010, at 1:55 PM, M. Warner Losh wrote:
ashtongj <ashto...@comcast.net> writes:
McCarthy and Seidelmann, on page 17 of _TIME: From Earth Rotation
to Atomic Physics_ (2009) state "GMT is still used as the official
time scale of the United Kingdom and in some communication systems
as UTC."
In one of these mailing lists, there was a debate about NASA using
the term "GMT" when they really meant "UTC". There were many
different references cited during that debate. One of them
indicated that even in the UK there's not a clear distinction
between GMT and UTC and often (but not always?) the terms are used
interchangeably. UTC being viewed as just another way to realize
GMT with some small, trivial error for the real pendants.
Precisely. (Or rather, approximately.) It will prove impossible to
untangle the historical identification of UTC as - well - a flavor of
actual Universal Time, which is to say a way of approximating GMT.
The simplest and most direct (and most likely to succeed) way to
achieve a goal of removing leap seconds from civil timekeeping would
be to advocate GPS timekeeping as the alternative. Civilians love
their GPS units.
Stop viewing this issue as a way to cleverly (that is to say, naively)
sneak through a putatively invisible change to every clock on the
planet. Rather, view it as a way to make timekeeping sexy and visible
and of significant economic interest. There is already a healthy GPS
industry in place that would be delighted to fill orders for new clocks.
Rob Seaman
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
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