3 ms·

Can anyone explain what the alternative is? Surely we won’t just get more and more out of synch with the earths orbit? Also why does it say the earth is slowi

Can anyone explain what the alternative is? Surely we won’t just get more and more out of synch with the earths orbit? Also why does it say the earth is slowing down but this year it sped up. Sounds quite impossible?

Hamuko 4y ago
>Surely we won’t just get more and more out of synch with the earths orbit? Why does being out of sync with the Earth's orbit matter?
- kangalioo 4y ago
  Because humans use time as an indicator for day and night
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Also, historically, we did care about the equinoxes and solstices falling on specific days of the calendar. We may not care anymore, but emphasis on may.
  - Vvector 4y ago
    And you can still use UTC as your indicator for day and night. In 100 years, it would only drift around 1 minute.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    We don't really do that on a second accuracy though. We need to add a whole new day to the calendar every four years to make up the difference. Meanwhile we've added less than half a minute worth of leap seconds.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    We already accept an error of half an hour (most timezone offsets are multiples of a whole hour) or more (many timezone boundaries are widened to align with state or country boundaries). A couple of minutes is nothing next to that, and if start getting too far, we can simply redefine the timezone offsets (which we already do twice a year in many places, and any device which might be moved across timezone boundaries already have to deal with that).
basilgohar 4y ago
The slowdown is the long-term trend caused by drag of the Moon's gravity, but the speedups are sporadic and as a result of events such as massive earthquakes that cause the Earth's rotation to speed up as some significant mass falls further to the Earth's center. The conservation of angular momentum is the principle that leads to those brief speed ups, but they will not fully counteract the longterm drag caused by the Moon. Edit: TLDR; Local maxima vs. overall trend.

Hamuko 4y ago

>Surely we won’t just get more and more out of synch with the earths orbit? Why does being out of sync with the Earth's orbit matter?

kangalioo 4y ago
Because humans use time as an indicator for day and night
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Also, historically, we did care about the equinoxes and solstices falling on specific days of the calendar. We may not care anymore, but emphasis on may.
- Vvector 4y ago
  And you can still use UTC as your indicator for day and night. In 100 years, it would only drift around 1 minute.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  We don't really do that on a second accuracy though. We need to add a whole new day to the calendar every four years to make up the difference. Meanwhile we've added less than half a minute worth of leap seconds.
- cesarb 4y ago
  We already accept an error of half an hour (most timezone offsets are multiples of a whole hour) or more (many timezone boundaries are widened to align with state or country boundaries). A couple of minutes is nothing next to that, and if start getting too far, we can simply redefine the timezone offsets (which we already do twice a year in many places, and any device which might be moved across timezone boundaries already have to deal with that).

basilgohar 4y ago

The slowdown is the long-term trend caused by drag of the Moon's gravity, but the speedups are sporadic and as a result of events such as massive earthquakes that cause the Earth's rotation to speed up as some significant mass falls further to the Earth's center. The conservation of angular momentum is the principle that leads to those brief speed ups, but they will not fully counteract the longterm drag caused by the Moon. Edit: TLDR; Local maxima vs. overall trend.