> 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
Bad idea. Here's the math. An average of one leap second a year is equivalent to a frequency offset of 1 / (365 * 86400) = 3.17e-8. This is how much slower your timebase has to be in order to match time as kept by the Earth. It is the equivalent to about 300 Hz at 9192 MHz. 3e-8 is a huge offset; a factor of a million less accurate than what a modern Cs will put out. It means that all atomic clocks (masers, cesium, and rubidium) and most OCXO on the planet would have to be re-calibrated every time you decide to change the length of a second [*]. That puts the number of affected time and frequency sources in the millions or tens of millions. But it would be very good business for cal labs. Busy, seasonal work, mind you, since every instrument in the world would need to be re-calibrated only on the same day). Wrist-watches and sundials would be ok. I think it also means that every scientific paper reporting time, frequency, wavelength, distance or energy to more than 8 or 9 digits in the past 40 years has to be rewritten. But the scientists could do all that while all their equipment was out to the cal labs so it might work out. > The beauty of this method is that there are only a few hundred Cs > clocks in the world, and they are phase locked to 10.000 MHz or I bet just us time-nuts together have a over a hundred Cs! I think the total number of Cs in the world is closer to ten thousand. Rubidium over a hundred thousand. OCXO in the millions. XO in the billions. /tvb http://www.LeapSecond.com [*] For several years in the 60's this is just what was done. HP distributed synthesizer settings or gears to change frequency by multiples of 50 or 100 e-10. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts