Re: [LEAPSECS] what should a time standard encompass?

From: William Thompson <thompson_at_ORPHEUS.NASCOM.NASA.GOV>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 13:38:47 -0500

John Cowan wrote:

        (stuff deleted)

> Because as a practical matter time-distribution protocols will never reach
> everybody, when you consider all the civil-time clocks in the world.
> Yet such clocks will be set, as a practical matter, from civil time. This
> leads to a very segmented time indeed.

>From my point of view, this seems to be an argument against changing the system,
rather than the reverse. The argument of some people seems to be that
astronomy's problems are irrelevant, and they should just depend on distributed
time signals to make up the lack. However, my point was that the burden will
come down hardest on the much larger number of amateur astronomers and
astronavigationalists who wouldn't necessarily have ready access to time signals
for the ever increasing discrepency between a TAI-like time, and Earth rotation.

In the same message, John wrote:

> I have no problem with this save a practical one: it will be too hard to
> change all the world's time legislation to point to TAI. So keep the
> name of UTC for Universal Time (Civil), and let astronomers go their own way.

I find the argument that astronomer's objections are inconvenient, and thus
should be just ignored, to be completely specious.

William Thompson
Received on Mon Jan 27 2003 - 10:38:53 PST