[LEAPSECS] Meeting with Wayne Whyte

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <16501ADA-631B-4FBB-B93B-2838F3891068 at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:

>On Feb 1, 2011, at 12:05 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

>

>> Note that I said "that's merely an artifact of how it is defined.",

>> not "The name 'Universal Time' has an unchangeable magic meaning."

>

>And I suppose "Greenwich Mean Time" is completely fair game, too.


Absolutely.  So far they've already moved which bit of Greenwich
it refers to by a couple hundred meters or when they adopted WGS84.

If Charles takes that fancy, he can rename Greenwich to "Camillaville"
once his mother is gone.

Would that change the name of GMT to CMT ?   


> And "Temps Atomique International" might designate a timescale

> created from an ensemble of clepsydra.


There's certainly atoms in all the clepsyhdra I have seen.

Words have only the meanings we give them Rob, and only as far
as we give them that meaning.

My grandmothers brother was decribed as a "A Very Gay Character"
when he arrived in New Orleans many years ago.  Today he wouldn't be,
because we give a new meaning to that word.

"Universal" had one meaning in the late 18-hundreds, but today
our universe is a lot bigger, what with space probes leaving
the solar system and all, so maybe it is time to make our
timescale "universal" rather than "universe as seen from this
planet".


>Universal Time is a concept predating the ITU whippersnappers.

>(Re)define some other timescale...


I don't need to point out, that nobody wants to mess with Universal
Time (UT), you can keep that for all we care.

And be careful what you ask for.

They might just call the new leap-less timescale

	 "Unified Time for Communication"

To shut up one particular loud astronomers claims of propertyrights
and TLAs.

-- 
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