[LEAPSECS] the inception of leap seconds

[Tony Finch]

Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> Of course, Tom showed years ago having a different base frequency than
> 9,192,631,770Hz would have fit the wobble of the earth better, but that was
> settled in the late 50s / early 60s so we'd have to go farther back in time
> to 'fix' that.

Further than that :-) The atomic second was matched to the ephemeris
second, which was based on Newcomb's Tables of the Sun. It isn't obvious
to me that there's any link in this chain of continuity where things went
wrong, until the introduction of leap seconds solved the problem the wrong
way :-)

Tony.
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