[tz] New Yorker article on David Mills and NTP

Paul Gilmartin PaulGBoulder at AIM.com
Wed Oct 5 12:02:13 UTC 2022


On 10/4/22 15:24:49, Steve Allen via tz wrote:
> 
> A decade ago two state of the art atomic clocks would agree with
> other within 1 second after 300 million years.
> In 300 million years a calendar based on purely atomic time will have
> counted 3 billion more days than have been witnessed by people living
> on the surface of Earth.
> 
On such time scales and much sooner, current astronomical data bases
will have been obsoleted by chaos in:
o ΔT
o n-body celestial mechanics
o precession of the equinoxes
o stellar proper motions.

Necessary empirical corrections will be made.

Smearing has proven less disruptive to computer systems than leap seconds.
I still favor UT1 as a generalization of smearing.

Are pulsar frequencies measured with TAI or UTC?

When Standard Time was established in the 19th Century, the width of
a time zone was about a day's travel distance.  This is obsolete.

People cling desperately to the alignment of clocks with solar
time.  Consider Uyghur civil disobedience in Xinjiang.

And yet, historically a six-hour adjustment was made abruptly, since:
<https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2020%3A1-16&version=KJV>.

> --
> Steve Allen                    <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
> UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260  Natural Sciences II, Room 165  Lat  +36.99855
> 1156 High Street               Voice: +1 831 459 3046         Lng -122.06015
> Santa Cruz, CA 95064           https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/  Hgt +250 m

-- 
gil




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