2005 year to be a second longer

2005 year to be a second longer

You cannot take anything for granted. Not even the rotation of the earth, as forces of nature have been slowing the earth just that little bit. To solve this problem of a slowing earth, it's been suggested that a 'Leap Second' be added at the very tail of 2005.

The missing second problem, rather the find that the earth has been slowing down, has been possible by the infallible accuracy of atomic clocks that had been invented around 3 decades ago.

It has been seven years since the last leap second and this time, in a world increasingly run by time dependent technology, its effects would be closely monitored by physicists and astrophysicists alike who have long been entangled with a debate regarding the role and future of time.

On one side of the debate are some experts who believe that this leap second be abolished since this adjustment could lead to expensive, unreasonable and perhaps even fatal disruption of various operations as quite of a lot of the softwares being used in everyday operations like mobiles, power grid, air traffic control depend on the synchronic accuracy of time.

The other side of the debate has those who believe that though this exercise would be expensive, people do believe in perfection.

How naughty this leap second would turn out to be, is something that researchers like physicist Ronald Beard of the Naval Research Laboratory hope to find out this year. "We're going to look at what happens this year. If there are no significant problems, the whole issue will go away, but I don't expect that to happen."

The idea of the leap second has thrown the spotlight back on atomic clocks which are based on the “resonance” of atoms while they traverse a magnetic field. It had been defined in 1958 as the time taken by atoms of Cesium 133 to beat through 9,192,631,770 cycles at which both astronomical time and atomic time are almost the same. Astronomical time has been defined to be 1/86,400th of a "mean solar day”.

The stars and their gravity, however, do not follow the rhythm of cesium. Besides natural factors like tides have been increasing the length of a day on Earth by two milliseconds every century. On the other hand, the atomic clocks have remained unaffected by any factors and have a known accuracy of less than a second for 20 million years.

This has caused the discrepancy that has to be corrected using the leap second.