On Tue 2026-07-28T13:33:01-0400 Tim Parenti via tz hath writ: > I find it hard to believe that a one-hour shift would be universally > acceptable to folks centuries from now, even if telegraphed for many > years. Of course, it won't be *our* problem then. But I think this > proposal, in both practice and effect, simply "accepts defeat" without > having to say that it accepts defeat.
The problem existed before these recent decisions. Look carefully at the ISO 8601 vocabulary about time. Nowhere in the current documents is the word Greenwich. The concepts of east and west are not present. There is merely UTC and offsets from UTC. This is the ultimate result of decisions made in the mid 18thy century. By 1760 the almanacs were not tablulating the mean solar time of the Greenwich (or any other) meridian. By 1800 the almanac time had become the civil time in most countries. Before 1900 Simon Newcomb regarded the meaning of time in the almanacs and openly questioned whether astronomers were doing the right thing, but then Newcomb published his Tables and followed the convention of explicitly choosing a time scale which would inevitably drift away from the mean solar time of the Greenwich meridian. The math is right there in the Newcomb expressions, and again in the explanations from D.H. Sadler about the side effects of adopting Ephemeris Time while retaining Newcomb's expressions. The recent decisions about leap seconds are merely increasing by a factor of 365 the rate of drift of UTC away from the mean solar time of the Greenwich meridian. The eventual crisis of UTC being unrelated to the number of times inhabitants of earth see the sun pass overhead is going to require a re-thinking of what humans want to use as the basis for civil time, but for right now the only reasonable course is the removal of leap seconds from UTC. -- Steve Allen <[email protected]> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
