[LEAPSECS] Looking-glass, through

[Tony Finch]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011, Rob Seaman wrote:

>

> Sloshing the timezones around willy-nilly by every regional government

> on Earth is not a solution to establishing the underlying common

> timescale.


Of course not, that's backwards. The common timescale is the basis of
timezones, not the other way round.


> the fundamental issue is the clock *rate*.


Yes, but how accurately do you need clocks to track it? How frequently do
you need to make adjustments to correct for the atomic/angular rate error,
and what size of adjustment is acceptable?


> No.  The current timezone system provides access to *Greenwich* mean

> solar time (under the guise of "Universal Time"). Civil timekeeping

> isn't about setting my particular clock to a local standard - it is

> about marshalling all those local standards into a single coherent

> global standard.


That seems completely backwards to me. The common global standard is the
basis of the local standards, not the other way round. Civil time (i.e.
the legal time in a particular jurisdiction) is established to serve local
or regional needs. Jurisdictions base their local time on a round-number
offset from the global standard because that is most convenient.

What you describe is how the global standard is implemented, not what it
is for.


> For instance, what authority will historians or lawyers consult to learn

> the applicable timezone offsets that were in force in some location(s)

> during some epoch(s) in question?


That problem exists whether universal time is atomic or angular so it
makes no difference to the proposal.

Tony.
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