The leap second's time will be up in 2035—and tech companies are thrilled

  • 📰 PopSci
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 42 sec. here
  • 2 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 20%
  • Publisher: 63%

Malaysia News News

Malaysia Malaysia Latest News,Malaysia Malaysia Headlines

The world’s metrologists just hope that someone will come up with a better solution for syncing human timekeeping with nature.

down due to lots of complicated factors including the ocean tides and shifts in how the Earth’s mass is distributed. All this means that days are getting ever so slightly longer, a few milliseconds at a time. If we continued to assume that all days are exactly 86,400 seconds long, our clocks would drift out of alignment with the sun. Wait long enough and it would start rising at midnight.

In 1972, BIMP agreed to a simple fix: leap seconds. Like leap days, leap seconds would be inserted into the year so as to align Universal Coordinated Time with the Earth-tracking Universal Time . Leap seconds aren’t needed predictably or very often. So, instead of having a regular pattern for adding them, BIMP would tally up all the extra milliseconds and it was necessary, tell everyone to add one whole millisecond to the clock. Between 1972 and now, 27 leap seconds have been inserted into UTC.

The problem is that all the interlinked computers on the internet use UTC to function, not just let you know that it’s time for lunch. When files are saved to a database, they’re time stamped with UTC; when you play an online video game, it relies on UTC to work out who shot first; if you post a Tweet, UTC is in the mix.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.

Its all relative. Time to make a drink and contemplate what I'll do in 2035.

Big deal. Where I work, almost all the computers display a different time!

We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 298. in MY

Malaysia Malaysia Latest News, Malaysia Malaysia Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.

California’s push to replace its diesel fleet sparks concern and criticism from industryCalifornia regulators approved a contentious amendment to phase out its medium- and heavy-duty diesel trucking fleet at its ports and rail yards by 2035, an effort to wean the state off fossil fuel-powered vehicles and spur investments in electric trucks — even as industry officials have criticized…
Source: dcexaminer - 🏆 6. / 94 Read more »