World time to drop the leap second from May 2027 - Euronews.com

Leap seconds have driven a raging debate in the metrological community for three decades. Now, that argument has been put to rest: The leap second is officially dead. Doing away with an obscure metric the average person has been blissfully unaware of may seem like a novelty, but killing the leap second has major ramifications for technology you rely on every day. It also helps stave off what could’ve been a dangerous moment in time: The possibility of the world’s first negative leap second. The International Bureau of Weights and Measurements (known by its French acronym BIPM) on Thursday said that in May 2027 it would stop issuing leap seconds, 32 of which have been added since 1972 to adjust what’s known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The world implemented the leap second in 1972 due to a growing gap between time measured with atomic clocks and time based on the Earth’s rotation. The reason for the discrepancy? The latter is slowing down due in large part to tidal friction caused by the moon and Earth’s rotation not lining up. The molten core of the Earth as well as oceans and the atmosphere also affect the spin rate.

Human timekeeping rests on two main clocks, and they don’t always run at the same speed. For decades, the solution was the leap second, a minor adjustment added to international time to keep atomic accuracy aligned with the Earth’s natural motion. But on Thursday, the General Conference on Weights and Measures, or the CGPM (abbreviated from its French name), voted to abolish the leap second, closing a long-standing chapter in global time sync. Most modern clocks rely on Coordinated Universal Time, a hybrid system caught between atomic time, which flows at a near-perfectly constant rate, and astronomical time, which fluctuates as the Earth’s rotation speeds up and slows down. To bridge the gap, UTC periodically inserted a leap second to keep pace with the planet. But reconciling physical planetary shifts with precise digital systems ultimately created more technical disruptions than it solved.

After decades of discussion, quibbling and worrying about clocks in computer systems, the world’s official timekeepers have voted to replace what many viewed as a tiresome correction: the leap second. It’s time, they say, for the leap hour. Delegates from 69 countries cast their votes on Thursday at a conference in France of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which ensures the world sticks to the same standards of time, weight, distance and more. The decision to adopt the leap hour from next year aims to reduce the risk of computers and other technical systems tripping over as their software grapples with minutes lasting 61 seconds – and, worse, 59 seconds – instead of a round 60. “After 30 years of debate, the leap second is making way for the leap hour,” said Dr Setnam Shemar, principal scientist in the time and frequency department at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL).

Open this photo in gallery:Microsoft's Majorana 2 quantum computing chip, which the company designed with help from AI. John Brecher/ReutersSheema Khan is an author who holds a PhD from Harvard University in chemical physics, along with numerous patents on drug delivery technology. I fell in love with Schrödinger’s equation at Marianopolis College in Quebec. That love took me to courses in quantum mechanics at McGill and later at Harvard, where I would spend many delightful hours studying Feynman diagrams in the physics library. The mathematical elegance and physical implications of those equations were mesmerizing. Just a few years prior, Richard Feynman had first introduced the idea of quantum computing, arguing that traditional computers could not properly simulate quantum mechanical systems. Today, the next computing disruption is on the horizon, based on the peculiarities of quantum physics. Today’s computers operate based on bits, the smallest units of data, which have a value of either 0 or 1. Quantum computers, on the other hand, operate on “qubits” (quantum bits); a qubit can be 0, 1 or any combination in between.