“PEOPLE worry that we’ll soon be eating lunch at midnight,” says Robert Nelson of the Satellite Engineering Research Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland. But that will not happen, he says, even if a proposal to abolish the leap second goes ahead.
An extra second is added to atomic clocks from time to time to keep them in sync with the solar day, which is steadily lengthening as the Earth’s rotation slows. But the practice could be abolished when the International Telecommunication Union meets in Geneva in November.
Leap seconds pose a problem for the clocks in the internet and GPS devices,…
