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Almost certainly not. The problem time keeping is meant to solve is coordination of physical movements between separated parties that have exceptionally limite
by akira2501 2y ago
Almost certainly not.
The problem time keeping is meant to solve is coordination of physical movements between separated parties that have exceptionally limited and delayed communication capabilities.
All of the time issues we deal with today are in service of keeping these important properties of our civil time in tact.
In terms of computers we should happily ignore the problems of civil time, simply just use TAI, and use a provided database to convert this into "human display time" whenever necessary.
- School-Cotton 2y agoLeap seconds do absolutely nothing to fix the problems you’re talking about, for anyone. If we had never invented UTC and used TAI (+ time zone offsets) for civil time, the fact that civil time is drifting away from solar time on the order of a minute a century or so would at most be an obscure curiosity.
- akira2501 2y agoThe question was about historical time keeping in general, not about leap seconds specifically, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Also, astronomers care about leap seconds, and astronomy is an important tool in making observations which lead to predictions about our universe, so I wouldn't be so cavalier in labeling it an "obscure curiosity."
- School-Cotton 2y agoI'm pretty sure astronomers don't care about leap seconds, and use more precise/fit-for-purpose tools.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- akira2501 2y agoThe whole reason to have leap seconds is _because of astronomy_. If we removed the leap second from civil time keeping, astronomers would still maintain it, because they want their observations across several decades or even centuries to use a time scale that's linked to the rotation of the earth. That's because their telescopes are bolted to earth. So when the rotation rate changes the time at which certain features appear in the telescope also change. They might consider using a higher precision version and make smaller updates more often but since the rate is not perfectly predictable and can be altered by local events on earth and you want all astronomers on earth to agree to the current value the second is the most reasonable unit of change for them to use.
- School-Cotton 2y agoOk fair. If it is so important to astronomers they should maintain it themselves rather than forcing the rest of the world to.