On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> This "problem" was handled in the '50s when the National Bureau of
> Standards, with the cooperation of the rest of the world's standards
> bureaus created the notion of the leap-second. The NBS is now
> known as NIST. They have a web-page www.nist.gov which is kind of
> interesting. The leap-second swallows the time necessary to make
> our time correspond with the rest of the time in the known universe,
> in little increments, rather than having to add a whole day once
> every 400 years. Further, it keeps daytime time in the daylight.
This thread has already gone on too long and I'm sorry to contribute to
it, but this is not correct. The leap seconds handle the correlation
between astronomical time and utc (so that the sun appears in the same
position on the sky at the correct time). Leap days handle the correlation
of our orbital position around the sun to dates.
Peter
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