Timekeeping and a Modest Proposal
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In case you’re wondering about the significance of the image associated with this post, it is a portrait of Jonathan Swift, originator of the “modest proposal.”
A couple days ago I wrote about Unix time and how it doesn’t exactly mean what it is said to mean. Some people may not know what Unix time is, or even what Unix is, but suffice it to say Unix time is very widely used behind the scenes.
The time it takes earth to orbit the sun is not a simple number of days, or even a constant number of days. The length of the year and the length of the day vary. Hence complications such as leap days and leap seconds.
The “modest proposal” in my post was that rather than adding a leap second, we simply move the earth about two miles further from the sun. Kepler’s laws show that’s all it would take to lengthen the year by a second.
The discussion of Unix time inevitably goes down the rabbit hole of how a second is defined. This morning I wrote a post looking at how a second is defined now and what motivated the various components of the definition.
Enjoy.
John, I love your posts. Some of them are quite beyond my level of understanding but they always exercise my brain for which I am thankful. You are my math and physics Guru.
The syllable gu means shadows
The syllable ru, a person who disperses them,
Because of the power to disperse darkness
The Guru is thus named.
— Advayataraka Upanishad 14—18, verse 5
Your post about timekeeping reminds me that time as we understand it at the basic level is a human invention measured by speed and distance and all celestial bodies including flotsam and jetsam have their own time relative to their orbit and spin, etc., and so the only stationary point must be Heaven and the time in heaven must always be "now."