[LEAPSECS] Possible outcomes ?

[Rob Seaman]

On Aug 13, 2013, at 3:05 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:


> There are only two realistically possible outcomes:


Interesting that you fail to mention other outcomes such as the consensus from the 2003 Torino meeting of calling a leap-less timescale something other than UTC.  Among other things this would leave UTC for backwards compatibility.


> Leap seconds go, and nothing much happens, apart from a

> handful of astronomers needing dental repairs,


This assertion is and always has been completely unsupported, and remains broadly untested.  Where it has been tested it has been found false:

	http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/futureofutc/2011/preprints/36_AAS_11-677_Seaman.pdf

Note also that the proceedings of the 2011 Exton meeting (http://www.univelt.com/book=3042), and soon the 2013 Charlottesville meeting, were published by the American Astronautical Society, not by the astronomy community.

And for another thing, leap seconds can't just "go".  The long-term quadratic trend that was described in the 1999 McCarthy and Klepczynski article (http://gauss.gge.unb.ca/papers.pdf/gpsworld.november99.pdf) guarantees that we'll have to deal with the embargoed leap seconds at some point.


> or leap second stays until they create

> enough havoc to be removed anyway (max 2 centuries)


It is significant that even you are saying we have 200 years to sort this out.  Simple prudence suggests testing assertions from the several parties *before* making changes.

Rob