Comment by tekne
7 hours ago
What deeply confuses me is why we don’t just:
- always use atomic time
- adjust civil timezones as needed to match astronomical time well enough
Somehow, I don’t see most political and contingent timezones lasting long enough to shift by an hour…
That's an interesting idea, but it could be argued that this assumes that all of the world's timezones will agree to observe the same set of leap seconds as they currently do.
Otherwise, it shifts timezones from being 15 minute granularity to 1 second granularity. Not technically impossible, but will definitely make cross-boarder meetings interesting once the discrepancy becomes large enough. I feel the 15 and 30 minute timezones are already bad enough.
Leapseconds don't track solar/astronomical time particularly well-- they track a 'mean time' which you can't even observe (because there are large periodic variations!)-- across the year the span is about 30 minutes.
If you have an application that needs a precise solar or astronomical time, you need to back out the leap seconds and then apply a more accurate correction already.
Because of this, I think it would be completely reasonable to just move timezones by 1 hour once the adjustment would be an improvement in accuracy--- which I seem to recall can be estimated to take about 4500 years. The adjustment is already compatible with existing software, and infrequent planned changes of this sort already happen for political reasons.
Because then one day you wake up early in the morning to find the noonday sun staring at you. It will take a while though. On second [heh] thought, you might not wake up. But some distant relative would.