Comment by cm2187
3 days ago
But does that mean that UTC time will diverge from common time zones by more than a fixed number of hours (and minutes for a few esoteric time zones)?
3 days ago
But does that mean that UTC time will diverge from common time zones by more than a fixed number of hours (and minutes for a few esoteric time zones)?
The time zones are defined as UTC + some offset, so no. What UTC will diverge from is solar time (UT1 in the article), so that solar noon might not happen at 12:00 anymore.
But because the sun's trajectory changes throughout the year, and we live in very coarse timezones already, it was always a bit useless tracking this with seconds precision.
> so that solar noon might not happen at 12:00 anymore
The solar noon never happens at 12:00 anywhere anymore. We've left that era about 200 years ago when we synched clocks with the capital city for the benefit of train schedules.
P.S. Well, technically the solar noon happens at 12:00 in New York on January 2nd, Chicago on Jan 14, Denver on Dec 25th, Los Angeles on Jan 9, etc. (on other dates, it's off.) In Santiago de Compostela — where they want to be on the same clock as Warsaw — solar noon happens as "early" as 13:18 and as late as 14:40.
are you saying that we may have a situation where 10:00:10 UTC might be 11:00:11 BST ?
If so I'm failing to see how this is less likely to cause bugs
No, never. BST is defined as UTC + 1 hour. The leap seconds were making both UTC and BST jump around, and now neither will jump around anymore.