View from the North 40: Time is now meaningless

What were you doing June 29, 2022? Whatever is was, you did less of it than you think you did because that day was not a full 24 hours.

That’s right, we were all bilked out of our precious time together by 1.59 milliseconds.

The website Timanddate.com which is a go-to site for things atomic clock-related said that this was the shortest day recorded since the atomic clock got fired up in the 1960s.

The atomic clock tracks actual length of days through the modern magic of science, and they have seen some longer days and some shorter than 24 hours, but June 29 is the shortest so far.

I looked up the date, and June 29 was a beautiful day in my world with a high of 82 degrees and a lovely 57 F for a low, just a few clouds in the sky. That’s not a day you want to be robbed of.

The day I’m writing this column is 100 degrees with a hot, fire-danger-is-super-high wind blowing. I’d be OK if we got past this sooner — or if it happened on some miserable day in the dead of winter. That could be shorter, too.

Like if you lived at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica where June 29 was -83 F for a high and -96 F for a low on their first really chilly day of their winter. I’m sure if you were there with the handful of overwintering scientists you’d be saying, “Y’know, I thought this day was going to last forever, but nah, it was over before I knew it. Sweet.”

Scientists, the website says, attribute the fluctuations to “processes in Earth’s inner or outer layers, oceans, tides, or even climate.” Some new science suggests that it might be the “Chandler wobble,” a “name given to a small, irregular movement of Earth’s geographical poles across the surface of the globe.” The site adds, scientists are not sure what causes the length of day fluctuation. The result is that they have no way of predicting length of days in advance.

You know, technically, an atomic clock measures the exact length of a second and then the seconds are strung together to measure length of day. Apparently, we’ve seen more short days than long ones so we may reach a point where — and I hope you’re sitting down for this — we will have to have a “negative leap second.”

That means we would have to skip all of our clocks ahead, everywhere in the world, by one second.

Which would be an actual computer technology crisis of a magnitude humans thought the year 2000 would be.

I don’t mean to sound all braggy here, but I get this. I can actually grasp the whole wobbly Earth thing — it’s like when a figure skater changes the speed of her rotation by putting her arms out to go slower or tucking them to her chest to spin faster. Or like when you’re whisking eggs and sometimes everything swirls right in the bowl, and sometimes a yoke gets away from you and blops out of the bowl.

Not that anything is going to fling off the Earth. I’m just saying that Earth has a lot of moving parts spinning in a giant universe and it’s pretty remarkable the only chaos is a millisecond or two every now and then.

It’s not like Leap Day.

A day was short or long by a millisecond? Our clocks don’t know. We have to adjust those suckers all the time anyway, but we literally add a whole day to the year every four years. How does that add up?

Every year we have an extra quarter of a day — that’s six hours. That’s a chunk of time. Where does it come from? Where do we store it?

Why aren’t we adjusting clocks for that? I mean, if we haven’t been accounting for this extra time all year then on Jan. 1 we should wake up thinking it’s 6 a.m., but nah, it’s noon.

“Here’s that quarter of a day you haven’t been factoring in all year, humans. You’re welcome.”

That’s not intuitive like an ice skater or an egg-whiskin’ or a Chandler wobble.

Do you know what I could’ve done with that 1.59 milliseconds? Virtually nothing. I could only have about 16/100ths of a heartbeat in that time. But a quarter of a day a year? That’s just shy of a minute every day.

You can do something with a minute. Do you know how many times I’ve had to “hold on a minute” or wait for someone to “be with you in a minute?” A lot. So I know, and you know, that a minute can feel like forever with lots of sighing and eye rolling and glancing at a clock — Which we know now probably has the wrong time any given day.

Y’know, when Leap Year comes around, we don’t even get paid interest on all those quarters of a day that have been stashed away for four years.

——

We really need to get to the bottom of this at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .