[LEAPSECS] Leap smear

Steve Allen sla at ucolick.org
Tue Sep 20 13:08:58 EDT 2011


On Tue 2011-09-20T17:50:05 +0100, Ian Batten hath writ:

> You cannot imagine how little most people care about the magnitude

> of DUT1 in five hundred years' time.


That was the attitude of factories about dumping mercury into the Rhine.
It turned out to be something people did come to care about.
So we also cannot imagine how much they will care about the underlying
basis for civil time in 500 years.

What we know now is that all existing agreements on the notion of UTC
have been established with the explicit acknowledgement that it
represents mean solar time. This starts with 1884 and continues
through the very documents which the CCIR published about UTC.

At the CCIR Plenary Assembly in 1978 when CCIR Rec. 460-2 were
published the supporting documentation literally rejoices at the 1975
CGPM resolution which says that UTC is mean solar time.

--
Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855
1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m


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