Their time has come Are leap seconds about to be abolished? THE
phrase “clockwork universe” is more than a pithy tribute to the
exactitude of physics. For thousands of years, the movement of
the heavens (or rather, as was eventually realised, the movement
of the Earth within the heavens) served as exactly that—a clock.
It still does. Even the hyper-accurate atomic clocks now used to
record the passage of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the
globe's official standard, regularly defer to the addition of
so-called leap seconds. These are introduced every so often by
the time lords of the International Earth Rotation and Reference
Systems Service. Their purpose is to match the relentless stream
of regular 86,400-second days that pour out of atomic clocks
with the slight irregularities that the Earth experiences in its
rotation around its axis. But possibly no longer. Next week, the
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is meeting in
Geneva, and one of the items on its agenda is the abolition of
the leap se