World Timekeepers Decide to Kill the Leap Second - CNET
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.
Breaking time
Computers are sensitive when it comes...
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