If 2005 is disappearing too fast for you, just hold on for a second, because this year you have an extra second to pause and reflect on the year before the ball drops and the calendar flips New Year's Eve.

Yep, it's a leap second moment, one of those rare occasions when clocks around the world take a stutter step in order to conform with the Earth's wobbly, gradually slowing spin.

But don't count on having many extra moments in the future, because there's a movement in the telecommunications field to do away with leap seconds as early as 2007.

In a 24/7 world, leap seconds that adjust the timekeeping of atomic clocks to the time based on the rising and setting of the sun are viewed by many technocrats as a nuisance.

Atomic time, based on the radiation frequency of the cesium-133 atom, has been around since the 1950s. Timekeeping based on the Earth's rotation goes back thousands of years.

The trouble is, atomic clocks are so accurate that they can go for 3 million years without losing a second. Earth's rotation, it turns out, is somewhat less reliable.

When international agreement was reached on Co-coordinated Universal Time in 1972, scientists figured that regular leap seconds would need to be added every 18 months to keep the two systems in sync.

Instead, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Frankfurt, Germany, has had to request only 22 leap seconds, coming on either June 30 or Dec. 31, since 1972. Scientists expect the slowing of the rotation will increase over thousands of years, requiring even more frequent corrections to atomic time.

This is all too random for software programmers and others in electronics industries where a 61-second minute doesn't compute.

The U.S. government two years ago proposed that leap seconds be abolished.

Labels: News

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27, 2005 at 11:12 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.