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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNeil deGrasse Tyson: The last Leap Second added was June 30, 2012....
The last Leap Second added was June 30, 2012. Heres what it looked like from the Eastern Time Zone.
Electric Monk
(13,869 posts)HFRN
(1,469 posts)dhill926
(16,355 posts)damn....
Motown_Johnny
(22,308 posts)False advertising.
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)Motown_Johnny
(22,308 posts)then it couldn't be accurate within 1/5th of that amount of time.
It was either off by ~0.8 or it is now off by ~0.8 seconds.
Except of course that the time is whatever the people in charge of keeping time say it is. My post was a bit of a joke. I suppose if you are using the earth's rotation as the basis, then it must have been off by ~0.8 seconds.
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)normally the clock goes from 59 seconds to 0 seconds of the next minute. In other words, seconds are zero ordered, the first second is :00, the sixtieth is :59. They show the clock going from :59 to :60 to :00. The :60 is the sixty-first second in that minute.
How is that not accurate to within 0.2 seconds? Of course, it could have been recorded at any time and not been accurate at all, but if the screen shots are real, there's absolutely nothing in them to suggest they are not accurate to 0.2 seconds.
Are you maybe mistaking the 19:59:59 as 19 minutes 59 seconds and 59 hundredths, instead of 19 hours (7 PM) 59 minutes and 59 seconds?
Motown_Johnny
(22,308 posts)I am saying that if you add a full second then at some point it could not possibly be accurate to within 0.2 seconds.
If it needed a full second to be accurate again, then it must have been off by 0.8 seconds.
Simple math. Nothing more.
ProdigalJunkMail
(12,017 posts)the official time clocked from :59 to :60 to :00... so yes, it was consistently accurate. if there had been no :60 then your argument would hold water, but because there WAS a :60 the clock was accurate to within 0.2 seconds of that time.
sP
Motown_Johnny
(22,308 posts)or more accurately, the entire method we use to keep time was off
ProdigalJunkMail
(12,017 posts)Motown_Johnny
(22,308 posts)The entire concept of how we keep time is arbitrary.
My point is that if it needed an entire second added to be made accurate then it must have been off by a second.
I know that if you adhere simply to the arbitrary method by which we keep time, then it was accurate. But if you grasp that the way we keep time is to keep track of the motion of our planet, then it was off. Yes, even though it is our planet which slowed slightly and therefore required the addition of the leap second.
My post was "tongue in cheek". If you are completely literal about it then you missed my point.
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)You are interchangeably using official time and astronomical time.
Motown_Johnny
(22,308 posts)Which is why the clock must have been off since the two were not in agreement.
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)at any given point in time. The clocks in the screen captures (assuming that they were not faked) were always within 0.2 seconds of official time. The leap second was to bring official time back in sync with astronomical time which is a different clock.
If you were trying to be humorous, you weren't.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,361 posts)It varies more than atomic clocks do, and seconds have been defined, again for several decades, based on atomic phenomena rather than astronomical observation. The current system is to allow these minutes of '60 seconds past, and then 0', when they are needed to move the global time so that it gives the astronomical time at Greenwich, for, say, midnight, to the correct nearest second.
There is a proposal to give up these leap seconds, in which case astronomical time would gradually drift from the official time - meaning sunrise and sunset would gradually drift away from the times each location currently has for them.