Payson Roundup

Those sneaky clocks. They’ve done it again.

Unbeknownst to the common man, the powers that be snuck in an extra second on Dec. 31.

Earlier this summer, the International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service sent out a bulletin, from Paris, “to authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time.”

The message’s purpose was to alert those masters of time that a “leap second” would be added onto the last minute of the year. (However, The Arizona Republic reports that the extra second will occur here at 4:59:59 in the afternoon.)

The 61-second minute that completed 2008 in rare grandeur was the 24th since 1972 when leap seconds began and the first since Dec. 31, 2005. Leap seconds, which can be added or subtracted although the latter has yet to occur, are also occasionally introduced at the end of June.

Seconds, while seemingly irrelevant, are kind of a big deal. The New York Times reports, “consider that in one second a cheetah can dash 34 yards, a telephone signal can travel 100,000 miles, a hummingbird can beat its wings 70 times and 8 million of your blood cells can die.”

Until 1967, seconds were based on the earth’s rotation around the sun: think sundial. However, the Earth has been erratically slowing because of friction — the tides, earthquakes and volcanoes, among other things.

The rate of that slowing is too varied to calculate with any sort of modern precision, and seconds are now defined in terms of atomic time because insanely smart people decided that modern, atomic time, was a more reliable way to gauge its passage than the Earth, that long-loved but apparently undependable planet we live on.

The tradition-loving humans that we are, astronomical time is still around — for now — and leap seconds are occasionally added onto the atomic clock to keep it consistent with astronomical time.

However, the Associated Press reports that some scientists want to scrap astronomical time because they say the leap seconds are complicated — all computer and electrical devices must account for the extra second. Also, Asia gets stuck adding a second during the day, and we saw earlier how much life can unfold during that time. The extra unit mucks up people’s lives and could potentially devastate global positioning systems or the tracking of airplanes, according to critics.

One problem. A change to atomic time would mean that in one millennium, the sun would peak in the sky at one o’clock instead of noon.

The International Telecommunications Union, which is an arm of the United Nations and essentially controls international time standards, could vote on the switch next year with an effective date of 2018 if approved. However, the intense debate might negate the possibility of a vote.

This odd wrestling over the control of time is disturbing, to say the least. The important agencies charged with “distributing” time forget the audacity of humans to believe that we can control it.

And we’re no scientists, but an experiment with something so special as time would need a control group. Where’s the control group? How do we know that atomic time is accurate if there is no constant with which to compare it?

Humans naturally strive to control and understand the universe, and we’ve done a pretty good job. We now know the Earth rotates around the sun, instead of the other way around, we’ve built skyscrapers and no longer sleep in caves and we even use toilets. That’s pretty advanced.

But our love of modernity tarnishes when scientists think they are smarter than the universe. We trust the universe and believe it has its own plan.

Humans should not abandon the perhaps imprecise astronomical clock. After all, the sun serves humans, and our method of time keeping should reflect that.

And why all this fuss over time, anyway? The most fun times are often the ones when people forget clocks.

The entire point of a vacation is to forget what day it is, let the sun shine on your face and listen to ocean waves unravel onto the shore — well that’s our version of a vacation, anyway. (Incidentally, those same magnificent waves that caress our stresses away are those same dastardly waves helping to slow the Earth’s rotation.)

Time is a stressor, especially with all this infighting about what time it is. So take a breath and this new year, don’t look at your watch so much. No one knows if it’s right anyway.

So regardless of how you assess time, have a happy and prosperous new year.