We resumed classes this week, and I’m absolutely slammed with the paperwork that comes with the start of a new term. So I’m going to recycle something I wrote back in November (at the suggestion of our communications office), and sent to the New York Times letter section. It’s a response to a piece they ran about the “leap second,” but they didn’t run it.
Alanna Mitchell's "Time Is Running Out for the Leap Second" describes the current effort to end the practice of adding an "extra" second to the Coordinated Universal Time scale (UTC) whenever the time tracked by atomic clocks gets out of sync with the time as measured by the rotation of the Earth. This is merely the latest such adjustment in a process dating back thousands of years. The ancient Egyptian civil calendar was keyed to the rising of the star Sirius at the start of the Nile flood season, but as their 365-day calendar was a bit too short, it gradually drifted off, rising a day "late" roughly every four years. The Egyptian priests tracked this but didn't correct it, and the calendar remained in use long enough that the Roman writer Censorinus in the second century BCE noted it had come all the way back around to have their new year coincide with the rising, a process that takes around 1400 years. This drift was partially fixed with the introduction of the Julian calendar in 8BCE, which introduced the system of leap years, and refined further with the Gregorian calendar reform in 1572. The definition of the second was decoupled from the changing rotation of the Earth in the 20th century, first with the introduction of "ephemeris time" in 1960, defining the second in terms of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and then in 1967 with the move to atomic time.
Each of these changes reflects an attempt to grapple with the fundamental impossibility of reconciling the astronomical motion of the Earth with a stable time scale-- both the length of a day and the length of a year change slowly, and neither is a round number of days or seconds. They also reflect something of the priorities of the cultures that implemented them, addressing problems that seemed important (such as the seasonal drift of religious festivals that inspired the Julian and Gregorian reforms) but always in a relatively convenient manner (the leap year rules add whole days in a simple pattern). Stopping the leap second to allow smoother operation of atomic-clock-based navigational systems is very much in keeping with the long and distinguished history of horological reforms.
And, after all, we have long since broken away from any strict relationship between clock time and astronomical time, dating back to the introduction of our modern system of time zones in the 1880s. We already agree to pretend that eastern Maine and western Indiana share a common time, because it's more convenient for modern transportation and communication networks. An additional drift of a second every now and again should be easy enough to accomodate.
This is, of course, something of a plug for my book A Brief History of Timekeeping. That’s also probably why they didn’t run it, but, I might as well get some use out of it, rather than simply letting this Substack sit completely fallow while I wait for some current events to comment on that aren’t stupid and/or depressing.
If you’d like to see that, whenever it happens, here’s a button:
And if you’d like to commiserate about the NYT not running your stuff, either, the comments will be open.
You've written before about initiatives to integrate writing in courses which aren't obviously writing-centric--perhaps trying to get an LTE published in the NYT would be a useful take on that?
My takeaway from the NYT article is that almost everyone agrees that the leap second should go except for the Russians (because GLONASS) and the Vatican (because of some mysticism). I think the most important part of your letter is the third paragraph, to point out that we've practically decoupled clock and astronomical time for well over a century now. Besides the Egyptian details, I'm not sure what an NYT Letters editor would think your first two paragraphs add to the discussion?
You didn't seem to address the biggest complaint with the leap second, which is that it creates havoc among computer systems. I don't know if I agree that dealing with leap seconds should rightfully be considered "too much work; not worth it," but I do think there are a lot of smart people making this argument, so it bears consideration.