On this coming Sunday June 30, intrepid horologists from around
the world will daringly attempt to hold back the relentless
onslaught of time. Well, to be fair it won't actually be that
difficult. July 1st is scheduled to start an entire second later
than it should, a feat of temporal distortion that will be
accomplished by making the final minute of the month last 61
seconds. And should you feel put out by this, you can take it up
with the Earth and its wobbly spin. 2012 features a leap second
— that ever so important added slice of time that compensates
for inconsistencies in the Earth's rotation. It takes our planet
just over 86,400 seconds to make its 360-degree rotation. But
because the Earth is affected by the gravitational pull of the
Sun and Moon, along with the rolling of the tides, our planet's
rotation is slightly slowed down. These rotational mis-steps
cause the Earth to get out of synch with International Atomic
Time (IAT), which uses the pulsation of atoms to measure time to
an accuracy of sever