Starting in 2035, the 1-second adjustments made every 18 months won’t happen for a 100-year period, and that’s more important than it sounds.
As of 2035, the leap seconds they will be suspended and, perhaps, never to return. This small timing tweak might not seem like a big deal, but it makes all the difference in our increasingly computer-dependent world. How are we now?
Scientists and representatives of several countries took this decision at a conference in France last Friday (18), to try to solve a problem that is becoming increasingly serious. And it’s good that at the next conference, in 2026, researchers already have a plan to replace leap seconds.
What are leap seconds?
The scientific term for this adjustment is a leap second, but the leap year analogy has become better known. It has been adopted since 1972 to realize astronomical time, which considers the day as the passage of 24 hours, based on the rotation of the planet.
When atomic clocks arrived, scientists were faced with one fact: a day is not exactly 24 hours🇧🇷 The difference is only milliseconds, but over the years it would accumulate to a delay of many hours.
Plus, even astronomical time counting isn’t as reliable as we thought. The orbit of the Moon and the rotation of the Sun play a major role in the tidal forces of the Earth, i.e. these stars exert gravity and thereby, the rotation of the planet is slowed down.
Each year, tidal forces increase the time it takes for the Earth to complete one full rotation. Again, that’s a difference of a few microseconds per day, but it adds up if we don’t tweak our clocks.
These clocks give us something called International Atomic Time, measuring the count of time using information from some two hundred atomic clocks in more than 50 national laboratories around the world. The problem is that simply changing them at the end by adding 1 second doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore.
collapse in sight
Everything worked great between 1972 and the advent of networked computers, but now this fix can wreak havoc. For software and connected systems, a leap second is a very abrupt change.
In computers, time counting is something measured by software that was not created by “mistake”. Each minute lasts exactly 60 seconds and each second has 1000 milliseconds. Changing 1 second in all connected systems of the world has become a more difficult task than we could have imagined.
Any change in the count of International Atomic Time must also be a simultaneous change in all the world’s computers, since much of the technology and critical operations depend on perfect synchronization between the clocks.
A small discrepancy of 1 second, or even a few milliseconds, between clocks can affect electrical networks, telecommunications systems, financial systems, collision avoidance services in shipping and aviation, and much more. It’s something we don’t want to “pay to see”.
The topic has been on the agenda since 2015, but was postponed by the International Telecommunication Union, which regulates leap seconds. Companies like Google and Meta have lobbied to move the debate forward (after all, they know how affected a “leap second catastrophe” can be).
Finally, the debate brought us to the Versailles Meeting in France, where the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) called for a deadline for discontinuing leap seconds and the agreement was to wait until 2035. From that date , there will be no more adjustments for 100 years or forever.
During that leap-year-free period, scientists hope to find a more sustainable solution for keeping international atomic time in line with time based on Earth’s rotation. At the end of that amount of time, you just need to add about 1 minute to fix everything again.
But is it really necessary these days? The leap second was adopted so as not to have too large a discrepancy between UTC, which uses International Atomic Time, and UT1, which uses the movement of the Earth. Perhaps the coming decades will show us that this effort is no longer worth it.
It may be that, 100 years from now, researchers will agree on a bold approach: abandon the abstract definition of time entirely and fully embrace atomic time, which is probably the most accurate measurement we know.
Another possibility is to continue making adjustments, but with much longer intervals, as will probably be done in 2135. Also because the Earth’s rotation can also accelerate, request the time on your watch to be removed🇧🇷 Who knows, maybe by then the software will be able to handle these adjustments much better?
Source: The conversation
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Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
