The time has come — or will come, in 2035
— to abandon the leap second.
So voted the member states of the international
treaty governing science and measurement standards, at a meeting in
Versailles, France, on Friday. The nearly unanimous vote on what was known as “Resolution
D” was met with relief and jubilation from the world’s metrologists, some of
whom have been pressing for a solution to the leap second problem for decades.
اضافة اعلان
“Unbelievable,” Patrizia Tavella, director of the
time department of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, known from
its French name as BIPM and based outside Paris, wrote in a WhatsApp message
shortly after the vote. “More than 20 years of discussion and now a great
agreement.”
The US was a firm supporter of the resolution. “It
feels like a historic day,” said Elizabeth Donley, chief of the time and
frequency division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or
NIST, in Boulder, Colorado.
The leap second has caused trouble since its
inception 50 years ago. It was devised to align the international atomic time
scale, in use since 1967 and derived from the vibration of cesium atoms, with
the slightly slower time that Earth keeps as it rotates. In effect, whenever
atomic time is one second ahead, it stops for a second to allow Earth to catch
up. Ten leap seconds were inserted into the atomic time scale when the system
was unveiled in 1972. Twenty-seven more have been added since.
But modern global computing systems have become more
tightly intertwined and more reliant on hyper-precise timing, sometimes to the
billionth of a second. Adding the extra second heightens the risk that those
systems, which are responsible for telecommunication networks, energy
transmission, financial transactions, and other vital enterprises, will crash
or fail to synchronize.
“Resolution D” calls for UTC to go uninterrupted by
leap seconds from 2035 until at least 2135 and for metrologists to eventually
figure out how to reconcile the atomic and astronomical time scales with fewer
headaches.
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