On 1/15/19 11:36 PM, Warner Losh wrote: > It's a fundamental flaw of UTC. There are other ways to implement > something akin to UTC that implements some form of mean solar time > that's not an observational calendar.
If either part of this is consensus, then a proposal to redefine UTC after a certain date is also fundamentally flawed. Redefinition cannot simplify a standard - any standard - it can only make it more complex, e.g.: "before the specified date, the standard behaves one way, after it behaves another way". Timekeeping has many retroactive use cases, including all those intervals people mention. What about instances that cross the redefinition boundary and the two end points have two different meanings? The engineering requirements to support the original definition never go away. The vast majority of timestamps trace back to GPS and other GNSS-derived values, even if GPS is deemed an unclean standard by the lab-coated acolytes of the atomic clocks (https://bit.ly/2MeCcGp). Or TAI itself is already available - indeed, UTC provides TAI as well as a prediction of UT1. Or simply define a new unsegmented TI timescale as was the consensus at the Torino meeting in 2003. Redefining UTC would be a colossal blunder. The time wasted over the past two decades on this fool's errand could have been better spent standing up a new TI infrastructure, or simply writing better documentation. That said, nothing about the current discussion bears on the definition of UTC, only on how best to handle conversions. Rob
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