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Issue 11.11 | November 2003
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Why the World's Clocks Are Wrong

Something Completely Different 
Hype List 
It's Just a Flesh Wound 
Jargon Watch 
Why the World's Clocks Are Wrong 
Stitch Yourself Up With Glue 
Taming the Electricity Beast 
A Whole New Ball Game 
The Curiously Strong Pump 
Called to Action 
The 411 on the Phone's Fall Season 
The Selling Power of Orange 
A Fair User's Manual 
The Only Thing I've Copied Is My Lawyer! 
Legos, Camera, Action! 
Striking Gold at 1,640 Feet Below 
A Ray of Hope for Solar Sails 
Petitions for Every Cause 
The Puzzle Master 
Wired l Tired l Expired 

Nathan Fox
Nathan Fox
It's later than you think. Or earlier. It depends on which clock you're looking at - the world's timekeepers can't get synchronized. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures adopted Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, in 1972. But it's a kludge, merging atomic time (1 second is 9,192,631,770 specific oscillations of a cesium 133 atom) with rotational time (1 second is 1/86,400 of a day). And it keeps getting kludgier: For some reason, Earth's rotation is slowing, forcing our atomic time lords to insert corrective "leap seconds."

It's a bad situation. The telecom industry, among others, relies on precise timekeeping. At the bureau's word, clocks register a leap second by marking 23:59:59 twice - early in the business day in Asia. Global positioning satellites' internal atomic clocks race 13 seconds ahead of UTC. The European satellite navigation constellation, Galileo, will likely vary from International Atomic Time by 33 nanoseconds. Coordination of timescales is so quirky that "people say it's a wreck waiting to happen," says Dennis McCarthy, head of the US Naval Observatory's Directorate of Time.

So what's to be done? Astronomers use rotational time to aim telescopes, so they favor the leap second. Shorter leaps, more often, might work. (Leap milliseconds?) Others want to rely solely on atomic time. An International Telecommunication Union working group, moving with a speed typical of global bureaucracies, is waiting to hear more ideas. Time is not on their side.

- Adam Rogers

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