Happy Thought for 16 October 2026

Have a Happy Thought:

Time is unreliable.

You may think that is not so happy a thought, but really it is freeing.


In 2018, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), who are the official horologists (timekeepers) for the world, basically, determined that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) can differ from International Atomic Time (TAI) by up to one second.

By June 2024, they were predicting the need for a negative leap second, coming sometime soon.

For a refresher on leap years, minutes and seconds, and why we might need a negative leap second, check out https://cymittw.blogspot.com/2024/06/happy-thought-for-21-june.html

 

But now… it turns out that doing a leap second, specifically a negative leap second, might just be “too hard”.

Let’s back up a second (hah!)

The most recent meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures determined that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) can differ from International Atomic Time (TAI) by up to one hour. That is 3,600 times the previous acceptable difference.

So what is going on here?

1.    The growing probability of a negative leap second – now reaching 30% probability by 2035.

2.  So many places in the world have daylight savings time, so they can be “off” by an hour anyway.

3.  The sheer number of things in our world that rely on clocks (from GPS to any smart sensor… basically anything that will need to ‘call home’)

 

This is the end to just under a century of leap seconds – in 1967, time has been defined as:

·      1 second = 9,192,631,770 vibrations of the caesium atom

·      1 minute = 60 seconds

·      1 hour = 60 minutes

·      1 day = 24 hours = 86,400 seconds

·      etc

·      And if we needed to adjust the length of a “day” because of variations in the speed of Earth’s rotation, well, we just did that. Because we had the technology, and it relied on precise clocks.

 

Now, we have found that we have so many pieces of technology that need to talk to each other, and it’s just too hard to programme in the occasional minute that only lasts 59 seconds, it’s easier to just keep clocks the same, and for individual pieces of technology (like GPS satellites) that rely on a caesium clock, they just keep a “difference calculator”.

 

The amount of calculation to apply a negative leap second is actually compared to the amount of effort needed to fix the Y2K "bug"!

 

Long (hah!) story short…

 

Nothing really changes for any of us that aren’t software engineers.

For those of you that are, hopefully the CGPM’s resolution won’t give you too much pause (hah!).

Time is imaginary

Go get lost in the great outdoors (weather dependent)

 

 

Thanks to AkaSci on Fosstodon and the Guardian for bringing this to us

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