Did you feel worse than usual after partying all night on New Year’s Eve? Or, if you retired early, before midnight, maybe you’re beginning 2017 feeling extra rested? That’s because while you were celebrating – or sleeping – keepers of the Universal Coordinated Time added an extra second to the night.
That’s because astronomical time, determined by the earth’s revolution, does not coordinate with atomic time, measured at 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium-133 atom per second. The latter is what your smartphone displays. The culprit is the earth’s inconsistent spinning on its axis. For the past forty years it has been running slower than atomic time, something about the earth’s liquid core speeding up and slowing down its revolving. As a result, every six or seven years the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service adds a “Leap Second.” Google, Apple and other tech titans have to adjust their atomic clocks. When the technology world takes over everything, the astronomical timekeepers may be the ones doing the adjusting. If you think that’s a better resolution, recall that it was the tech wizards who did not know that the year 2000 was coming.
