[LEAPSECS] How you know you're having an effect (was Re: ...)

[Warner Losh]

On 12/31/2010 05:37, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

> Rob Seaman said:

>> 	FACT: civil timekeeping is ultimately tied to the synodic day (i.e., "mean solar time")

> You make this claim regularly and label it "fact". However, it is a claim,

> not a fact. It may be true at present, but that's just as likely to be

> because the people setting civil timekeeping don't understand the issues.

> After all, given that the time that summer time starts and ends in a large

> part of the world depends on what language you speak, can you really claim

> with a straight face that legislators have thought this through?

>

> The fact that people happily accept a difference of over two hours between

> legal and mean solar time means they aren't *that* worried about it. And

> what little pressure there is on the topic in the UK is in favour of making

> the discrepency *bigger*.

>

> (Yes, I know the difference between cyclic and monotonic effects. That's

> not the point.

That was exactly the point I tried to make to Rob for years.  He keeps 
blasting back that tired refrain, and after the first time of trying to 
explain that I do get it, I started ignoring it.  Rob likes to confuse 
the conflate any analogy of moving away from the sun with a total 
support for never having a way to align time to the sun.  While 
countless ways have been suggested to Rob that are no more burdonsome 
than the current time zone mess, he continues to wheel out this old saw.

Frankly, people need to agree on what time it is, and the rest of why 
somebody says its that time don't matter to all but a vanishingly small 
minority.  Almost nobody is going to care if the mean solar time differs 
from the time their clocks tell them.  Well, nobody except people that 
care about time and angle of the earth being the same.  In the past they 
were, but given that the international definition of a second is what it 
is, there necessarily must be a disconnect between the two.  Even Rob 
argues for a mean solar time, like that's somehow better than the actual 
solar time.  It is better for him, in his astronomical calculations, but 
who cares?  It is worse for other people.  When confronted with this 
reality, Rob runs head long into the solar time argument, without 
realizing that he's picking an arbitrary solar time.  One could get 
along nicely with having the 'mean solar time' be uncorrected, except by 
legislative action every 500ish years or so to move the timezone east by 
one notch.  That may be an acceptable definition of 'mean solar time' 
for the purposes of civil time, even if it is a horrible definition for 
the purposes of astronomy, astronavigation, and other things.

So yes, even if we never 'resyncrhonize' the UT1 time and the UTC time, 
there's adequate mechanisms that can be developed to cope (distribute 
DUT1 in a format that can grow large enough: 3276.7 seconds gives us 
about 500 years, to harken back to an earlier message).  Civil 
authorities likely would be happy enough with moving the timezones every 
500 years or so to cope with the drift.  And in 1500ish years time we'll 
have to throw out the current ITU standard anyway because leap seconds 
will be more frequent than monthly.

Unlike the rotation of the earth around the sun, which is stable over 
the course of 100k years or more, the earth's rotation and the second's 
definition are in a fight that only gets worse in time, and at best any 
standard we come up with today that keeps things in sync will only last 
1500 years or so.  What is our technology going to bring us in that 
time?  There's a very real chance that as our hunger for forces us out 
into the solar system a purely terran time system will be viewed as 
quaint and antiquated in that time horizon.

Warner