UTC might be redefined without Leap Seconds
ucolick.org
ucolick.org
I guess people don't like mid-summer January because it makes historical comparisons more difficult. Not impossible, just awkward.
It's a horrible messy dilemma. Leap seconds don't seem as dramatic as the Roman intercalary days, but there's the same battle between synchronicity and simplicity (where simplicity = something short of insane perturbations).
Maybe none of this matters for radio broadcast time signals. Maybe you just want a fixed counter everyone's synchronizing to, and people should convert to the Earth's messy system at the last possible moment.
Fun story about the awesome 13 month Calendar that we could have adopted (except for Hitler): http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-calendar/
http://www.livescience.com/38083-earth-core-day-length-patte...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-rotation-sum...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110316-japan...
buddy, you're only visiting earth for a precious handful of years
It would take 60 years of skipping yearly leap seconds before we saw even a 1 minute offset.
Prior to 1972, UTC and TAI used different definitions of a second (UTC used a definition based on positions of celestial bodies while TAI used a definition based on the hyperfine transition of cesium, and the two were periodically manually "stepped" back into sync). As of 1972 they use the same definition of the second (TAI's definition, which is also the SI definition), and a final "step" was applied to cause the difference in the two times to be an integer number of TAI seconds. That created an offset of 10 seconds, which has since grown with the addition of 25 (and soon to be 26) positive and zero negative leap seconds to UTC.
That's how long for noon to end up at midnight. Noon would occur at night after only around 22000 years (I'm being fuzzy because people may not all agree on what night means).
It does not change the angular momentum of any system, nor does it change the moment of inertial of the sun-earth system.
Earthquakes are also not the only means by which the Earth's rotation can be affected. The moon's gravity creates all sorts of tidal forces on Earth; such forces don't just create tidal waves, but can influence everything from Earth's rotation to continental drift.
Of course, hypothetically, a sufficiently-violent volcanic eruption could end up working like a giant rocket engine and thus push the Earth in some direction or other (in much the same way as normal rocket engines do; in this case, magma/lava/steam would be the propellant(s)). That's the only way I can think of off the top of my head for earthquakes to affect Earth's orbit, and should that happen, I highly doubt UTC being synchronized with Earth would be particularly relevant at that point, since something of that magnitude would probably significantly damage (if not destroy) Earth, and would almost certainly exterminate anything unfortunate enough to still be living on the planet.
That calendar would have never worked. You would have to keep changing when the weekend is each year as the real Saturday/Sunday would shift by a day each year relative to the calendar. Some people would not care others would, and it would be a mess.
And don't just flippantly suggest "so don't shift", the 7 day pattern of weeks has been kept by humanity for thousands of years by cultures all over the world. It's not something so easily dropped.
I'll be frank: if we haven't progressed to the point that those offsets generally don't matter by those points in time, we've probably already failed as a species.
I say we drop leap seconds.
But they matter to some applications, and those people have arguments trying to decide which to use.
But yes: the ultimate solution if the world were to move to atomic/absolute clock synchronization instead of referencing the Earth's rotation is that every few hundred years we would need to adjust all the time zones by an hour to keep "noon" in the middle of the day. Given that we do this every decade or two anyway chasing DST vogues, I think this would be acceptable.
It is not so much that the actual times drift apart very fast, it is that the clock tries to corrupt the meaning of the word "day".
If leap seconds cause problems for your application, you probably should find another source of synchronisation signal.
Plenty of applications need to know a precise number of seconds (or milliseconds or nanoseconds) between the present and a past or future date/time. Leap seconds throw a wrench in that. Whether UTC should serve the role of an unaltered time source is indeed a matter of debate (and for good reason), but it's pretty clear that we do need an unaltered stream of seconds (upon which UTC - or an intermediate between UTC and various timezones should UTC fill this role as advocated - would base itself, as would any other applications that require said unaltered stream of seconds).
This isn't even mentioning more far-fetched things like space travel (at which point the non-constant rotational parameters of an arbitrary planetary body are neither relevant nor appropriate for system-wide/galaxy-wide/universal/multiversal timekeeping).
Also seriously, leap seconds suck as an offset because a second is a huge amount of time for many applications.
1. Let them drift
2. Introduce a computational complication (leap seconds) to synchronize them
But the dispute is not over which of these is "right", the dispute is over which of these two options gets to go by the label "UTC". This could be easily resolved by simply defining two UTCs, one with leap seconds, and the other without. You could call them UTC-L and UTC-N (or UTC-S and UTC-N if you wanted to mollify the French ;-).
http://www.livescience.com/32120-can-a-nuclear-blast-alter-e...
(I'm assuming that particular test served as your inspiration.)
On the other hand, I think the idea of abolishing leap seconds is to no longer derive wall time from earth rotation, and to derive it from atomic time instead. So "UTC" would still refer to "the source of wall time". As I understand it, this is the point of changing the derivation of UTC: there are lots of laws in different countries that say that wall clock time is tied to UTC, so if we want to switch from earth rotation to atomic time, it is easier to change the definition of UTC than to change the laws in all those countries.