A July news item made the year 2005 look like a Cinderella who’s left with an extra second after the midnight stroke. That is, time would stand still for a second at midnight on December 31, following a global timekeepers’ decision to stretch the last day of 2005 by one second — a little bit longer for many to enjoy New Year’s Eve. Call it a leap second, the micro version of a leap year.
Bringing the world’s atomic clocks into sync with the Earth’s pace has become necessary because of the irregularities in the way the planet rotates. But suddenly there is a very strong groundswell, even among experts, against the leap second imperative, while astronomers fear that Coordinated Universal Time is certain to drift with respect to solar time. “Noon will eventually coincide with sunrise if we leave it long enough” and adjusting telescopes to distant stars would be real tough.
But many recall how an occasion leap second had caused “computer glitches and havoc in communications” in the past. In January 1996, it made the Associated Press Radio broadcast the wrong programs, as their computers crashed. And in1997, it forced the Russian global positioning system Glonass to break down for 20 hours. It can even down traffic-control systems and present a risk to future air travel. To Dr Duncan Steel, an Australian space researcher and the author of a book on the history of time-keeping, leap seconds are a “techno-fix that are not really needed”. Computer scientists call it a kludge.
Any fix like this almost inevitably brings in problems — often unforeseen. Perhaps The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which standardizes and regulates all international radio and telecommunications, has a solid argument when they regard leap seconds as an unnecessary complication. Besides, our need for leap seconds will work like addiction in essence, because the Earth is continuing to slow down, which means we will need them more frequently in the future.
Steel suggests an alternative to doing away with leap seconds: The unit of time we call a ‘second’ was defined in terms of the length of the day as it was in the year 1900. Why not redefine it with relevance to 2000? This may sound a logical solution but it comes with a hidden problem. Most people have no idea that seconds are the fundamental unit on which other (unlikely) units such as length are based! Redefine the second, and you will have to redefine the metre too.
SNEAK PREVIEW
WHEELCHAIRED, BUT WINGED
When reminded that man hasn’t been back to the moon in 30 years, he shrugged it off, saying that “Columbus went to America and nobody went back again for decades”. That is Sir Arthur C. Clarke for you. Though polio tied him to a wheelchair at 87, he reels of long, long thoughts about long-distance space travel. One of Clarke’s heraldic ideas is to first send robot probes, followed by humans, perhaps in suspended animation. Or, “When their bodies begin to deteriorate, you just transfer their thoughts, so their personalities could be immortal. You just save their thoughts on a disc and plug it in, simple!”
NAMED AFTER A PRINCESS
In 1960, Frank Drake, who is considered to be the father of SETI, headed up a radio telescope experiment that listened for transmissions beamed through space by intelligent aliens. He named his experiment Project Ozma. Sounds like Osama bin Laden, but in his book “Is Anyone Out There?”, Drake writes that he named Project Ozma after the princess in L. Frank Baum’s children’s story Ozma of Oz. Drake had adored the book as a child and, like Baum, was “dreaming of a land far away, peopled by strange and exotic beings”.
QUIZ No.204
1. Bubbles will form in your Champagne only if the glass is …
– Slightly dirty
– Held in dim light
– Perfectly washed
– Mildly heated
1. Slightly dirty (Zebra Crossing No.203)
2. Who used Darwin’s theory to study the evolution of baseball batting averages?
– Margo Wilson
– Desmond Morris
– Stephen J. Gould
– Robert Ardery
2. Stephen J. Gould
3. A doumentary by this director inspired the first bungee jumper who used elastic ropes.
– Sergio Leone
– Robert Flaherty
– David Attenborough
– Stanley Kubrick
3. David Attenborough (the film is about Pentecost Island’s vine jumpers )
4. Who popularised the idea of safari as a distinctive way of hunting?
– Peter Flack
–Robert Ruark
– Ernest Hemingway
– Rudyard Kipling
4. Ernest Hemingway (and Teddy Roosevelt)
5. What would you associate with “reverse english”?
– Billiards
– Cheese spread
– Anti-Colonialism
– Mental deterioration
5. Billiards (english is a kind of spin applied to the cue ball).