Tick, tock, tick, tick, tock
Apr. 22nd, 2006 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuAn interesting article from Science News about the great Leap Sceond debate.
The one thing that I hadn't realized until I learned from this article was that as the glaciers melt and their mass flows down towards the Earth's center of gravity, that decreases the moment of inertia and causes the planet's rotation to speed up (much as an ice skater can pull in one's arms to increase the speed of rotation) --- not enough to completely counter the friction of the tides, but enough to have a measurable effect.
(FWIW, I'm on the side of the astronomers. Keep the leap second. Then again, Judaism and Islam had this same debate centuries ago and that's why the Hebrew calendar sometimes has 13 months in a year but Ramadan can occur in any season.)
The one thing that I hadn't realized until I learned from this article was that as the glaciers melt and their mass flows down towards the Earth's center of gravity, that decreases the moment of inertia and causes the planet's rotation to speed up (much as an ice skater can pull in one's arms to increase the speed of rotation) --- not enough to completely counter the friction of the tides, but enough to have a measurable effect.
(FWIW, I'm on the side of the astronomers. Keep the leap second. Then again, Judaism and Islam had this same debate centuries ago and that's why the Hebrew calendar sometimes has 13 months in a year but Ramadan can occur in any season.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-23 08:30 pm (UTC)In any case, there is much more than just geophysics (http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html) in the story than hinted at by the article, and the history of the subject (http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/timescales.html) is full of passionate, but hidden decisions.
After all, there can't really be a debate, can there?
Everyone believes that there is an answer to the question ``What time is it?'', so that must be true.
Right?