In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, David Forbes writes: >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 third argument is that this proposal has the exact same flaw as the leap-seconds: You cannot know the timescale in advance... -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
