jlevine wrote: > The proposal to incorporate leap seconds by changing the length of > the > second was tried before in the early days of atomic time. It was not a > very > workable idea then and it would be even more difficult to implement > now.
Perhaps this is not what you are referring to, but I finally have remedied my ignorance concerning the time standard in use prior to 1972. In the period from 1961 to 1972, UTC used a second that was lengthened from the SI second by 15 nanoseconds, and was further kept within 0.1 second of UT2 (mean solar time exclusive of the seasonal variations) by means of occasional seconds that were lengthened, usually by 100 ms. While this met people's needs for a while, it had its limitations, and something more modern was required, leading to the present UTC. I'm proposing a scheme which is somewhat different in principle, which could be closely tied to something similar to the current UTC, although, as you've noted, the need for discrepancies greater than 0.9 seconds between it and UT1 causes problems as well. There are never any 100ms steps or 1s steps, only frequency offsets that take the place of 1s steps. So this modified time scale could exist as an alternate service, just as SAT and UTC co-existed for a brief period. As an alternative service, it wouldn't *depend* on UTC being modified; it could, I suppose, have a greater lag in keeping up with changes in mean solar time than UTC. So UTC could be left alone, but a system similar to my suggestion could serve as "Internet Time" for the benefit of all those who can't deal with leap seconds, and yet who need accurate timekeeping. John Savard _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
