A Time Scientist Watches the World's 2 Official Clocks. He Says We Need a 'Leap Minute'.
An influential time scientist has suggested that Earth do away with leap seconds and go for a leap minute instead.
The less frequent syncing of Earth’s two official clocks would ease the stress on computers and those reliant on official time.
Gaining worldwide consensus on a solution to this problem, however, presents a pesky hurdle.
A leading scientist tasked with monitoring Earth’s two official clocks has a new proposal: the leap minute. A leap minute could erase the need for that pesky leap second added to our timekeeping every once in a while. If we let the world’s two competing clocks stray from each other for just a few seconds longer, a leap minute would only be needed every 50 years or so.
Judah Levine, head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, is a world leader in all things time. In fact, he’s actually responsible for those leap seconds—something we’ve done internationally since 1972. He told The New York Times that replacing the leap second with the leap minute could ease so much stress in the world of exact time.
“Having to deal with leap seconds drives me crazy,” he says. “We all need to relax a little bit.”
The whole leaping-by-seconds-or-minutes discussion is thanks to our world’s competing clocks. The Earth has two of them. Officially.
We’ve got the one clock that uses celestial objects—think: the Earth’s rotation based on observations of the Sun and stars—to keep time. The other was introduced in the 1970s, and uses atoms to ensure exacting time. But the astronomical time (officially known as Universal Time) and atomic time (International Atomic Time) don’t sync together. The astronomical clock often falls slightly behind, thanks to natural forces. And that makes keeping them synched them up—and giving us Coordinated Universal Time—is tricky.
While the deviation isn’t a major issue for the average person, our computer-dependent world has been starting to take notice. After all, everything from airplane control to stock trades needs exacting timing.
“Cesium clocks became very common, and right away there was a problem,” Levine tells The New York Times. Cesium is often the atom that puts the “atomic” in atomic clocks. “The astronomical clock and the cesium clock began to walk away from each other.”
The 1972 debut of the leap second meant that any time the two clocks grew apart by more than 0.9 seconds, we’d get a leap second—basically pausing the atomic clock to let the astronomical one catch up. But this grew common enough that we were doing it about once every year and a half.
The New York Times reports that major technology companies like Google and Amazon have created their own ways of dealing with the time difference. They largely ignore the leap second, and instead, each comes up with a slightly different way of keeping time congruent. “We made a mess of time all over the world,” Patrizia Tavella, director of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, tells the newspaper.
Levine says that doing away with the leap second—in 2035, a 100-year pause on the leap second will occur because of the disruption it causes companies—doesn’t do away with the problem of needing to reconcile the straying times. It also requires unanimous agreement from all countries involved (Russia historically hasn’t been a fan of abandoning the leap second, and some speculate it’s because their Glonass satellite system uses leap seconds).
So, expect the leap second—and now Levine’s leap minute—to remain a huge topic of discussion at time-driven international events. Only time will tell how we fix this problem.
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