Who Really Gives a Leap Second?
World Clocks to Pick Up Another Second Today
I don't really celebrate End Year's Day/New Year's Day per se , though I 'observe' it as a member of society. It is, after all, a pure invention, not even celebrating a deserving occasion of any astronomic or historic significance. It is, at base, Trickster Time elevated to a stature divine. And since Time, in the full course of life, serves variously as both a light and dark faerie (ultimately, consort of the faerie Death), I opt out as a full-fledged celebrant, preferring instead to watch a candle burn imprecisely rather than a ball drop with deadly precision.
Time, after all, is a truly strange notion and the calendar is a quirky invention to try to manage it. Yet in hopes of mastering the powers of prophecy and predictability provided by accurate synchronicity, people of all ages and cultures have seemed preoccupied with measuring and recording the passage of time.
The earliest recorded year in history seems to be 4236 BC, 6239-6240 years ago. The ancient Egyptians, like probably almost all ancients, observed cycles of things. For instance, they realized that the yearly inundation of the Nile occurred while the ‘dog star’ Sirius danced close to the Sun. They devised a 365-day year to 'capture' this cycle. Problem was (and is): the cycle they were observing was closer to (but not precisely or constantly) 365.25 days.
Contesting with this type of precision provided by solar events, remained the need of farmers to know when to plant. The moon seemed more attuned as an indicator to them with 12 moon cycles between one planting season and the next. Consequently, the Babylonians devised a lunar calendar based on alternating 29-day and 30-day months to furnish a 354-day year.
So, in the center ring circus of inventing the year, the Egyptian Sun (and Sunday) battled the Babylonian Moon (and Monday) for the hearts and minds of timekeepers.
But there were, for the even more observant, a lot of other ‘time skirmishes’ preventing time from being pigeonholed precisely. The Mayans, apparently high on drugs (my intuition), devised 17 concurrent cosmological calendars, to handle observed discrepancies. Their calendar based on Venus (the ‘Sacred Year’) provided a 260-day year (4 ‘quarters’ of 65 ‘days’, subdivided into 5 groups of 13 days). Yet their ‘solar’ calendar (the ‘Seasonal Year’), chained to cycles founded on their base-20 counting system, had 360 days (18 ‘months’ of 20 ‘days’ each) to which they added 5 ‘unlucky days’. Both ‘years’ ran in tandem and started anew on the same day every repeating 52 years.
Such complications in trying to make sense of time on Earth!
Even the current western world’s pope-prodded calendar (Gregorian—Gregory XIII) employs a system of ‘leap years’ ( 1 ‘leap day’ added every 4 years, ...like in a couple of years,). Except... years that are evenly divisible by 100 are excluded as leap years, unless they are also evenly divisible by 400, in which case, they are re-included as leap years.
And, in a tenaciously-clinging attempt to maintain this pope-prodded calendar (devised essentially to make church ‘holy days’ eternally repetitive, even if, like Easter, some of them would end up ‘floating’), the current scientific/money-based ("Time is money, money time.") western world needs to tweak the calendar even further by inclusion of either positive or negative ‘leap seconds’ about every 500 days.
It’s like this: 'Current time', as you and I know it, is measured with the precision of the ‘atomic second’, that is, the length of time required for 9,192,631,770 cycles of the Cesium atom at zero magnetic field. (We've a carbon-based life system, but a cesium-based time system!). This ‘atomic second’ when first devised in 1956 was then ‘back-linked’ to the Earth’s 'rotational second' in the year 1900. The atomic second thus defined was equivalent to the interval defined by the fraction 1 / 31,556,925.9747 of the year 1900.
Complicated enough for you yet? Don’t groan. For the sake of scientific precision, what’s a few more manipulations?
So here’s the clincher: the year 1900 is no longer equivalent in length to the year 2006 or any year hereafter. Tidal braking, core fluctuations, even atmospheric anomalies (and scientists aren’t even really sure what else) slows the Earth’s rotation constantly. Hence, the ‘cesium second’, post-anchored to the length of the year in 1900, would soon become imprecise unless those ‘leap seconds’ were added on, now and then, to ‘match’ the earth’s rotation to time.
What’s the point of all these man-invented time-synthesized adjustments? Precision. What’s the cost? A truer harmonic relationship with the naturalness of the cosmos. As a society, we love time. Yet isn't true love, backgrounded by the unfolding of cosmic processes, timeless ?
Indeed, we become in the image of the gods we worship, and Time, aka Chronos, currently sits atop the pantheon. Hence, are we ever so precise a people unto ourselves. But ever increasingly out of synch with much of everything else. If Love, aka Eros, instead sat atop our pantheon, I think we would see our years lengthen without leaps and we would allow time to ‘slow down’ in tune with the cosmos as mandated by the slowing rotation of the Earth. Chronos, dear Chronos forbid!
Still, the rotation of the Earth is slowing (days are getting longer by leap seconds at the rate of 2 ms per day, or .7 seconds per year) and will continue to slow until, just as now one face of the Moon always faces the Earth, someday one face of the Earth will always face the Moon, too. And, then, apparently unmoving vis-à-vis one another, the Earth and Moon will have a stare-off for forever more. Now that’s true cosmic love for you. (If you care not to reflect poetically, but seek more of the science behind this, go here.)
Until then? We leap and pretend that not a damn thing's changing.
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