[LEAPSECS] Schedule for success

[Rob Seaman]

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> Notice the "near": the 0° meridian no longe passes through the  

> transit instrument there.


Steve and Richard have replied with their usual level of precision.   
We risk getting lost in the details.

I might just remind folks that one arc second corresponds to 30 meters  
on the surface of the Earth.  At the equator, that means that one  
second of time corresponds to 450 meters.  (280m at the latitude of  
Greenwich.)  It is the ITU that is seeking to move the prime meridian,  
by about two-tenths of a mile per year at the equator (accelerating  
quadratically).

We've had this discussion before.  What might be different this time  
is that presumably there must now be some plan among the proponents of  
the ITU proposal to deal with the obvious and completely unacceptable  
implications.  Or is there?

Of the several rather absurd options it appears the one the ITU has  
selected, perhaps implicitly, is to throw Greenwich Mean Time under  
the bus.

I won't belabor in this message why that is not likely to happen in  
practice. But again - there are indeed two different kinds of time,  
and if you suppress one kind in one place, it will always pop up again  
somewhere else.

In any event, a policy for dealing with the prime meridian should  
appear in the ITU proposal.  If you think this is a non-issue, it  
should be easy to describe, right?

And what precisely does the ITU propose to do should the UK not accept  
this plan?  We've been gleefully informed that people persist in  
identifying UTC with GMT.  We've been told that GMT is nothing more  
than the timezone of Greenwich.  We've also been told that the  
intercalary corrections will be managed purely by local authorities  
messing with their timezones.  What if local authorities have  
different ideas about the appropriateness of this?

Greenwich Mean Time is (and will be) reified by nature.  UTC is  
currently reified by GMT.  The ITU seeks to wrench the two definitions  
apart, but is implicitly insisting that they remain the same so that  
the Greenwich timezone can participate in the inevitable intercalary  
adjustments.

The ITU's biggest argument is with itself.

Rob