A second to be added to the clock
National Institute of Standards and
Technology will compensate for Earth's tardiness
Staten Island Advance - Saturday, December 31,
2005
2006 is coming later than you think.
This year, champagne corks will already be flying,
streamers will already be fluttering and lips will already be locked
when Mother Earth tosses her tinsel in celebration of a new year,
thanks to the leap second, an extra blink occasionally added to the
world clock to cover up the planet's tardiness.
The U.S. Navy Web site defines the leap second as
necessary to "ensure that the difference between a uniform time
scale defined by atomic clocks does not differ from the Earth's
rotational time by more than 0.9 seconds."
In other words, the Earth's Fossil watch is a couple
of shaves of a second behind everyone else's each year, and it's
time for its tune-up.
"All it is really going to do is call attention to
the fact that things we tend to think of as being unchanging, such
as the length of a day, do actually change -- very, very slightly,"
said Fairfid Caudle, professor of psychology at the College of
Staten Island. "The things we tend to think of as being constant are
really always in flux."
The guardians of the U.S. primary standard of time
and frequency -- aka the atomic clock at the Boulder, Colo.,
laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
-- will insert the second at 23:59:60 British time, or 7 o'clock
tonight. It's the first time in seven years that a second has been
added.
Big deal, for most of us -- sometimes a sharp rap on
a watch's face can make it jump that second. Yet modern televisions,
telephones, marine and aviation navigation systems, computer
networks and electric power grids, just to name a few, depend on
time and frequency with a smaller variable than one second, says the
NIST. All will be adjusted for the leap second.
What should the rest of us do with that luxurious
extra second?
Give your eyes a rest with an extra blink. Snap your
fingers for the first time in 2006. Start your New Year's Eve
countdown at 11 instead. Finish that novel. Learn Japanese.
Take the redundant second to have two New Year's kisses -- or just
make the first one last twice as long.
"With [kissing], you're involving emotional parts of
the brain that don't seem to be most involved in time perception,"
said Prof. Caudle. "So I would hazard a guess -- and it's just a
guess -- that it's not going to make all that much difference."
Depends who's doing the counting.
By Melissa Anelli
Reprinted here with permission
from the
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