[time-nuts] Solving the UTC drift problem

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Thu Jul 14 02:25:24 EDT 2005


In message <a05210601befba18cc387@[192.168.0.8]>, David Forbes writes:
>A modest proposal:
>
>Instead of adding randomly-placed leap seconds to UTC or allowing UTC 
>to drift from UT1 etc, the timing community should just change the 
>second's definition from time to time as needed. That is, dither the 
>Cs transition frequency between 9,192,631,770 Hz or ,780 Hz annually 
>to make time speed up or slow down to match the earth's rotation.

That has already been tried (1958...1972)  It was not a success.

>The beauty of this method is that there are only a few hundred Cs 
>clocks in the world,

This number is probably one or two orders of magitude to low, but
a lot of them are telecom timers so they can be ignored.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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