“There are continuing problems with positive leap seconds, even after 50 years, and the concern was that negative leap seconds would be much more serious because its effects had never been tested,” says Levine.
Patrizia Tavella, director of the BIPM’s Time Department, confirmed these concerns in an email to WIRED. “The likelihood of a negative leap second convinced us to set the enforcement date at 2027,” she wrote, adding that there was increased urgency following testing by an industry standards group that “showed several failures with a negative jump.”
Tavella says the group is waiting until May 20, 2027 to implement it, as it is the anniversary of the 1875 signing of the Meter Convention, creating the BIPM, as well as Metrology Day. In other words, it’s the perfect time to mark the passage of time, or more precisely the absence of it.
The death of the leap second now makes life easier for everyone. “The good thing is, we don’t have to do anything!” Tavella said. “Just keep accumulating ‘normal’ 60-second seconds and minutes. »
Levine agrees, writing that “life will have one less hassle.”
But kicking the can of adding leap seconds doesn’t mean that atomic time and astronomical time won’t continue to drift apart. This is why the BIPM also agreed to create a leap time. Given the time it takes for leap seconds to add up, a leap hour is millennia away. (After all, an hour has 3,600 seconds.)
“We’re not talking about leap hour yet,” Tavella says. “If systems rely on UTC, they don’t need to do anything. If they rely on UT1, they need to be able to use UT1-UTC information which, in (the) future, will be greater than 1 second.”
In other words, it’s not our problem, and good luck to future generations!
Gn tech
