The Associated Press Time will pause a second before leaping to '09 GMT adjusts for slight slowing of Earth's rotation
By Raphael G. Satter and Jamey Keaten Associated Press December 31, 2008
AT THE GREENWICH PRIME MERIDIAN, England - Just a second, 2009.
It's going to take a little longer to say goodbye to the worst economic year since the Great Depression, but all for a good cause.
The custodians of time will ring in the new year by tacking a "leap second" onto the clock today to account for the minute slowing of the Earth's rotation.
The leap second has been used sporadically at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich since 1972, an adjustment that has kept Greenwich Mean Time the internationally agreed upon time standard.
Some scientists now say GMT should be replaced by International Atomic Time - computed outside Paris - because new technologies have allowed atomic time to tick away with down-to-the-nanosecond accuracy.
But opponents say atomic time's very precision poses a problem.
A strict measurement, they say, would change our very notion of time forever, as atomic clocks would one day outpace the familiar cycle of sunrise and sunset.
The time warp wouldn't be noticeable for generations, but within a millennium, noon - the hour associated with the sun's highest point in the sky - would occur around 1 o'clock. In tens of thousands of years, the sun would be days behind the human calendar.
...