PRI's The World: Leap Second Special Podcast

January 05, 2009

This, my friends, is one fancy time-keeping device. It's an atomic clock, and it is incredibly precise. Perhaps too precise. You see, while so much of the time-keeping that under girds our electronics, computers, critical infrastructure, etc. is kept, well, atomically, our body clocks are set more or less to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is based on something a lot less precise: the rotation of the Earth. The thing is -- and there's no need for great alarm here -- the Earth is slowing down (on average) these days. And that makes our Big Blue Marble a bad timekeeper. Some argue, therefore, that it's time to ditch GMT entirely, and let the atomic clocks rule our lives. But you can see the problem -- temporal drift. In time (and we're talking 600 or 700 years, give or take) atomic time and GMT would get so far apart that when those poor Brits take their afternoon tea, the clock would be reading three a.m.

And so, since the early 1970s, the atomic clock enthusiasts and the GMT timekeepers have struck a deal by adding "leap seconds" when needed. It just so happens that we get one of those at the tail end of 2008. So, we here at The World's Technology Podcast want to make the most of that extra second by offering you, well, an extra 'cast (WTP 225).

We hear from David Rooney, whose father was a clockmaker (you can't make this stuff up!), and who holds a most excellent title: Curator of Timekeeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Then, we turn to Steve Allen at the University of California's Lick Observatory, for even more information on how a tiny temporal moment can be the basis for so much confusion and fuss.

We hope you use your extra second judiciously.

A most excellent 2009, by the way, to everyone. It's been a please blogging here. Remember you can follow WTP on Twitter and Facebook.

(Photo via Wikimedia Commons courtesy of National Institute of Standards and Technology - Physics Laboratory: Time and Frequency Division)

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