Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

> How, and whether, to keep atomic time in sync with Earth's rotation is still up for debate.

[…]

> The CGPM — which also oversees the international system of units (SI) — has proposed that no leap second should be added for at least a century, allowing UT1 and UTC to slide out of sync by about 1 minute. But it plans to consult with other international organizations and decide by 2026 on what upper limit, if any, to put on how much they be allowed to diverge.

So everything about this hasn't quite been sorted out yet.

At some point there may need to be a reckoning like was done with the calendar:

> Second, in the years since the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325,[b] the excess leap days introduced by the Julian algorithm had caused the calendar to drift such that the (Northern) spring equinox was occurring well before its nominal 21 March date. This date was important to the Christian churches because it is fundamental to the calculation of the date of Easter. To reinstate the association, the reform advanced the date by 10 days:[c] Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15 October 1582.[3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

As annoying as handling a leap second could be, if it happens even somewhat regularly it can be testing more often. Deciding in the future to do a 'one-off' event may be more challenging from both a coördination point of view, as well as trying to handle a rare event correctly in (e.g.) code.

The correct answer is obvious — to stabilize the Earth's rotation — but there are a few implementation details to work out.

If we simply detonate the moon it would cease affecting the Earth's rotation, thus solving the problem.

Wouldn't work afaict. You'd have to get rid of the mass, not just explode it.

If you would detonate the moon, break it up into small pieces and smear them out over its orbit, tidal friction would cease. Tidal friction is a major component of the earth's rotation's slowdown.

> If you would detonate the moon, break it up into small pieces […]

Close to the plot of a recent Stephenson sci-fi novel:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves

I hated the fact that you had to get 9/10 through the book to find out how it derived its name. The number 7 appears right at the start, but it's a misdirection.

I got about halfway through before I started skimming. Interminable.

> Wouldn't work afaict. You'd have to get rid of the mass, not just explode it.

I'm sure kibwen had in mind a Hollywood explosion, whereby a detonated object ceases to exist, rather than turning into many smaller objects.

“Sir, are you suggesting that we blow up the moon?”

Nope, just explosive rapid deconstruction.

You've created the plot for 'Space: 2099'. Don't let Hollywood steal your idea.

But wouldn't the rotational speed of the earth become more erratic?

Indeed, but all life would be extinguished by the ensuing orbital bombardment, thus solving the problem.

It would certainly be easier than fixing all of the software

Freeman Dyson figured out how to do that along time ago, he was more interested in speeding up rotation to disassemble a planet but the same method can be applied to set the rotation to a given speed.

just build a planetary motor.

encircle the earth with ferromagnetic coils, then fire asteroids (similarly banded) at the earth in a series of near misses the magnetic drag steals or imparts angular momentum depending on the direction of the asteroid relative to the earth.

The drift is sufficiently slow that you can fix it with a "leap hour" when needed -- perhaps once every five thousand years. This could be handled for civil/local time via an adjustment in the timezone definitions (something which happens a few times a year today), leaving the underlying UTC timebase unchanged.

> This could be handled for civil/local time via an adjustment in the timezone definitions (something which happens a few times a year today), leaving the underlying UTC timebase unchanged.

Like I said: it could become a huge coordination problem.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Adoption_by...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_cale...

it's really just a tzdata update for the vast majority of computer systems. That package updates several times a year. Get the revised rule in there a decade in advance and you're golden.

> it's really just a tzdata update for the vast majority of computer systems.

I don't think you understand how the tzdata works: the tzdata folks only update the contents after the civil authority for a region changes the law.

So first you have to get all the law makers to update what the legal statues say and then you "just" update the computer systems. The latter is the 'easy' part, it's the former that's the coordination problem.

And as someone who was around for the 2005 DST change, I can say that may also be quite the coordination problem. (Though I think code has gotten much better since then.)

Let them handle it in the future when it becomes an issue, in roughly 500 years (that's when the lack of leap seconds will sum up to roughly 30 min). If they still care about having the sun above London at exactly 12 (or whenever it is in ut1) they can handle it.

That's a feature, not a bug. UTC adjustments require world-wide coordination.

Timezone adjustments do not. They are fundamentally a local matter, and just need to be communicated to the tireless maintainers of tzdata, and can happen incrementally any time an area feels local time is too far off solar time.

Then let's skip the leap hour too: just let UTC and UT1 diverge up to 86400 seconds and compensate that by changing the time zones when needed. Then, when the drift reaches 86400 seconds, the clock times are aligned again. At this point we just need to re-align the dates too, and this can be done by skipping February 29 on a leap year (which should be quite easy to implement in software).

Is that practical? Drift is slow and takes 1 min per century. Let’s say you can live with 10 minutes of drift. That leaves minutes [10-50] which is 4 centuries vs minutes [50-10] where it’s fine which is 2 centuries.

Also, if the problem were time zones, time zones already support non-whole hour shifts, so why not just apply the leap second into all time zones? The reason is that that isn’t what a leap second is. It’s kind of “how much time has elapsed since 1970 midnight” and that number is corrected for with leap seconds. Time zone offsets don’t help you here.

We actually live with about +/- 15 minutes of drift (of local solar noon vs. 12:00 local mean time) over the course of a year. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time

And timezones one hour wide impose about a +/- 30 minute fixed error (and sometimes larger) on top of that - the difference between local mean time and local civil time.

We have an implicit assumption for definitions of noon and midnight right now. I can't tell if that assumption will be there 1000 years later, but assuming that, UTC and UT1 can't really differ by much more than several hours.

This is the way.

The main difficulty is convincing Greenwich to not be utc+0 anymore.

Are we actually compensating for continental drift of the area around London already?

My understanding is that clocks in Greenwich are set to utc+1 from the last Sunday of March until the last Sunday of October. (They call it British Summer Time).

And we finished that transition in 1917. Time is hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com