The grey eminences of weights and measures in Paris who keep the Meter and the Gram, like the warp and weave of the Fates, are gifting the world with an extra second (Schaltsekunde) to compensate for the drift of the winding down rotation of the Earth in comparison to the their household atomics that keep Universal Coordinated Time, the reference point for most of the planet’s civilian timekeepers. With ever more exacting calipers, it seems that the Earth has drifted a whole second off the mark, since it was last adjusted on the last day of the year in 2008.
Time, though surely an analogue thing and not discrete, is by convention or definition, the parsing of now, and formalized in 1967 as the resonance of Cesium atom: at that moment a day was exactly twenty-four hours long and because of the regularity and precision of the experiment, atomic clocks promised to be accurate within two seconds over a span of 65 million years, from the present all the way through the eons to the extinction of the dinosaurs. The inconstant Earth however proved to be more unpredictable, speeding up or slowing down with shocks big and little, like earthquakes, the Moon and the orbits of artificial satellites, probably by an amount as significant over the decades as the meteor impact that caused the mass-extinction event millions of years prior. The hands of a clock have to pass through every degree of a circle and can’t skip around—but the pendulum can be slowed down or stopped, for a second out-of-time to take a relaxed, deep breath. That the Earth shifts
unpredictably does make me a bit uncomfortable, for all the ages of study by geomancers, navigators, physicists and philosophers one would think we wouldn’t have an inelegant solution, and I wonder how closely we are following the passage of the Sun overhead or peering into the vibrations of the elements and what standards and perspectives are most sensible.
