[LEAPSECS] a big week for leaps at SG7 and WP7A

[Rob Seaman]

On Sep 30, 2014, at 7:40 AM, Kevin Birth <Kevin.Birth at qc.cuny.edu> wrote:

> I would love there to be more sound social scientific research on this
> topic, but most social scientists who study time do not even know that
> this debate is happening, and with slow publishing cycles, by the time the
> researchers who are working on it get their work out, there is a good
> chance that a decision will have been made.

Considering this debate has been going on for 15 years, I wouldn’t be too sure ;-)

Having been exposed to IAU politics I’ll happily leave the UK politics to somebody else.  We should address these issues with a coherent systems engineering approach - including engineering requirements derived from all kinds of users.

As far as the rest, it simply remains that atomic time and solar time are two different things.  One way or another both need to be supported, and it makes no sense to subvert a solar timescale when we already have an atomic timescale available.  UTC should be retained for backwards compatibility and if a new atomic timescale is needed for some esoteric reason, follow the recommendation from the 2003 Torino meeting and call it “TI”.

Rob Seaman
National Optical Astronomy Observatory