Poul-Henning Kamp replies:
Shouldn't we explore the requirements and use cases before making a change to the standard?
Absolutely, but shouldn't we look at more than astronomy while doing so?
Are you under the impression that the folks pushing this proposal are looking anywhere beyond their own perceived self-interest? Look at http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs for examples of legal issues. A reporter from the WSJ has been calling around for a planned front page story about leap seconds. I don't know how it will be positioned, but they are surely interested in this from a commercial point of view. Historians may care deeply about whether some event occurred on one day (as defined by the Earth) as opposed to another day (as defined by mid-level international bureaucrats). Religious issues anybody?
I will agree with you that the current process for decision is somewhat flawed seen from a democratic point of view
It is flawed from the point of view of reaching a viable and logically self-consistent solution to the problem. The Earth spins. We should take note of that fact in all sorts of decision making.
The matter of the fact is that we have four groups of people here:
No, we actually have dozens or hundreds or thousands of groups. No attempt has been made to reach most of them.
Only Group 1) wants leapseconds because they are used to having them.
Astronomers want access to time-of-day (UT) as well as interval time (TAI) - UTC uniquely provides information about both. I would strongly prefer that civil time continue to track time-of-day. If the folks who claim to have authority over this decision (good luck with that at the end of the day) want to divorce civil time from the spinning Earth, well that is one thing. But to continue to call the resulting time scale "UTC" is an deeply troubling abomination. Not only would this scheme sacrifice time-of-day, it also fails to capture atomic time since it will just leave 34 seconds dangling for all eternity.
A far more coherent proposal would be to simply switch civil time from time-of-day to atomic time. This would recover the 33 (soon 34) second "gap" and that gap would be a useful tool to impress the - well - civilians that a significant change is being made to their civil clocks.
Astronomers could then continue doing what they've done for hundreds of years and set their own clocks.
Personally, I think this is silly - but at least it is self- consistent. The proposal on the table is not only silly - it is inconsistent and naive.
Just carrying out the "Y2K-like inventory" will cost more money than the astronomers would ever dream of getting their hands on.
You do, perhaps, understand that astronomers had some pretty stringent Y2K remediation of their own. I was attempting to make the point of the true underlying scale of this issue. Supporters of this proposal are simply *assuming* that a diverging DUT1 will cause no life-threatening issues. We were lucky with Y2K because we invested in creating our own good luck. Nobody has invested ten cents in a good luck safety net toward the retirement of leap seconds.
The problem is that UTC is printed in too many documents. The cost of having para-legals track it all down and passing ammendments to change it all to TAI or whatever we decide to call it would cost a fortune you cannot even dream about.
The fact is that UTC is used interchangeably with GMT throughout many of those documents. The concept of "leap seconds" is interchangeable with the concept of "Greenwich mean time". UTC is not just an empty bureaucratic name for "civil time". The equivalence of GMT and UTC is not something that can simply be wished away.
And you think the rest of the world think your clocks is a good enough argument that we have to pay the bill for down time, extra man-power and all that stuff ?
It isn't astronomers who need protection here. Anybody participating in the discussion from any community is technologically astute enough to sort out the issues. All we will need is money to restore services like telescope control to the level they were at before such a change. A colossal waste of time and money, but we'll muddle through no matter how stupid a decision is made.
The public - including folks like applications programmers who aren't educated in such issues - rely on many systems of time implicitly. They rely on both interval time and time-of-day; they also happen to often confuse the two. I don't know (yet) what will break. There has simply been no work whatsoever invested in resolving this question. Most communities (including an ATC technician I talked to a couple of years ago) have been left completely out of the loop.
As many things are likely to break because of failing to issue leap seconds as are likely to break because of continuing to issue them. The difference is that the former will break in ways that are harder to diagnose and fix because they will represent deep seated failures of the conceptual model of time.
The kinds of things that break when a leap second occur, on the other hand, represent failures of engineers, programmers and managers to properly implement a self-consistent conceptual model that has been in place as an international standard for three decades.
For many purposes the concept of time can be as sloppy as you want. Are these the purposes for which this list exists?
Rob Seaman NOAO _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
