At 8:25 AM +0200 7/14/05, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, David Forbes writes:
A modest proposal:
Instead of adding randomly-placed leap seconds to UTC or allowing UTC
to drift from UT1 etc, the timing community should just change the
second's definition from time to time as needed. That is, dither the
Cs transition frequency between 9,192,631,770 Hz or ,780 Hz annually
to make time speed up or slow down to match the earth's rotation.
That has already been tried (1958...1972) It was not a success.
I can see that it was not a success at the time, but the equipment of
the time was rather primitive compared to today's digitally
programmed electronics. It used to be difficult to synthesize a
microwave signal with 10 Hz resolution; now it's done in less than a
square mm of silicon.
However, the argument presented in the Metrologia article that
physicists would not have a fixed SI unit called the second is a
valid concern.
The beauty of this method is that there are only a few hundred Cs
clocks in the world,
This number is probably one or two orders of magitude to low, but
a lot of them are telecom timers so they can be ignored.
Tee hee. Yes, they don't what a second is, as long as each clock is
consistent with the clock at the other end of the fiber.
Symmetricom would love this idea, as they would get to sell a lot of
upgrade kits at monopoly prices.
--
--David Forbes, Tucson, AZ
http://www.cathodecorner.com/
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