(Image source from: One second more today})
Today the 30th June 2015, at midnight clocks will pause momentarily as the entire planet gains a bonus second. If you are gazing at the dial on an atomic clock, it will read 23:59:60 before ticking forward to 00.00.00. The addition of a “leap second” is designed to sync the Earth’s rotation, which is gradually slowing, to catch up with atomic clocks, by keeping the official time neatly in sync with night and day.
“There are consequences [to] tinkering with time,” said Peter Whibberley, a senior scientist at the National Physical Laboratory, which is responsible for defining the Greenwich Mean Time. “Because leap seconds are only introduced sporadically it is difficult to implement them in computers and mistakes can cause systems to fail temporarily.”
Last time a leap second was added, on a weekend in 2012, Mozilla, Reddit and LinkedIn all of them crashed. More than 400 flights were grounded as the Qantas check-in system went down, requiring the job to be done manually, in Australia.
Dr Leon Lobo, business development manager at NPL, who is involved in the preparations for today evening said, “If everyone adds the second in the same way at the same time it shouldn’t cause problems. But if some apply it in a different way or at a slightly different time, you start to have discrepancies in the time that people have. That’s when things trip up.”
By Premji
