GENEVA – It’s high noon for the humble leap second.
After ten years of talks, governments are headed for a showdown vote this week on an issue that pits technological precision against nature’s whims.
The United States, France and others are pushing for countries at a U.N. telecom meeting to abolish the leap second, which for 40 years has kept computers in sync with the Earth day.
Leap seconds are necessary to prevent atomic clocks from speeding ahead of solar time. They are added at irregular intervals, effectively stretching atomic time by a heartbeat to make up for the irregular wobble in the Earth’s rotation.
Critics warn that scrapping the leap second would break the last link between the passing of time and the course of the sun across the sky. But backers say machines shouldn’t any longer be tethered to the imprecise cycle of sunrise and sunset.
“This would be an important decision because the problem of introducing the leap second would disappear and we would have a more steady time than we have today,” Vincent Meens, an official at the International Telecommunication Union who has chaired technical talks on the issue, said Tuesday.
Operators of cell phone networks, financial markets and air traffic control
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