[LEAPSECS] Do good fences make good neighbors?

[Rob Seaman]

Back home in Tucson from the American Astronomical Society meeting.  Glad to see a rousing discussion, but I can't say that my heart is in unraveling the several threads.  Instead, permit me to pose a question.

Demetrios Matsakis, the founder of this list, wrote:


> I can't help with the flying cars, but UTC does "deliver" a frequency that is the most precisely and accurately measured quantity known to humans.  Time is the integral of that frequency,


What is described is a certain flavor of time.  Does this flavor capture the essence of civil timekeeping?  Generally phrases like "most precisely and accurately measured" are applied to highly scientific quantities of interest to small technical communities.

The current UTC *also* delivers access to the dominant cadence of our lives, the synodic day.  Both flavors of time are very widely used indeed.  Which more closely tracks the requirements of civil timekeeping?

My answer has always been that both are necessary.  Leap seconds are one possible way to reconcile these very different flavors of time.  We have discussed other ways, and we have discussed ways to make leap seconds more palatable if we choose not to undertake the daunting task of reinventing time.  We need not continue to butt heads.

Peace.

Rob
--
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.