PARIS: On June 30 at 23:59:59 GM, the world’s clocks will add an extra second to the day – bringing the total number of seconds for 2015 up to 31,536,001, Daily Mail reports.
Scientists say adding this ‘leap second’ is crucial to compensate for the slowing of the Earth’s rotation.
But according to some computer experts, the added time could wreak havoc to systems powering the Internet.The extra second is needed because the Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down by around two-thousandths of a second per day and it needs to catch up with atomic time.
Atomic time uses vibrations within atoms to measure time and is said to be the most reliable because atoms resonate at extremely consistent frequencies.
So leap seconds are occasionally used to help ‘Earth time’ catch up to ‘atomic time’ as the former is slower by about two thousands of a second per day.
To keep them in sync, it is necessary to occasionally jump Earth’s time back – for mathematical reasons similar to adding leap years. The decision to do so is made every time Earth time is slower by about half a second, making it about half a second quicker instead.
“At the time of the dinosaurs, Earth completed one rotation in about 23 hours,” says Daniel MacMillan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre.
“In the year 1820, a rotation took exactly 24 hours, or 86,400 standard seconds. Since 1820, the mean solar day has increased by about 2.5 milliseconds.”
This year will be the 26th time since 1972 that a leap second will have been added. When asked about keeping computer clocks synchronised, John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, said, “Time gets complicated fast.” This is because not everyone will add the leap second in the same way, or at same time.
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