Keeping pace.

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It's a commonly held belief that things are too fast for us today. The red queen from the Looking Glass World has starred not only in these pages, but, through her explanation of how we have to run just to stay in place, has become something of a folk hero in our culture. But it turns out that the world is actually slowing down. It's not the sort of thing that any of us are able to discern, with our without a highly accurate stop watch, but scientists assure us that this really is what's happening.

I won't pretend to understand the details, but essentially, approximately once a year since 1972 one second has been added to our day in order to keep our clocks synchronized with the earth. It was on this day, in 1972, that the first leap-second was added to the world's atomic clocks. Considering that very few of us seem to be aware of the slowing of the earth, that second, and the ones that followed it, seems to have fulfilled its purpose quite well, irregardless of the fact that all of the clocks in our house show different times, speeding up or slowing down almost at will, seemingly without any connection to the precise time of atomic clocks.

Confusing as the subject might be, it still receives a substantial amount of attention on the web. Explanations of various aspects of the phenomenon, all of them too technical for me, can be found here, here and here. A review of the subject a bit more fitting for the non-scientist can be found here.

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Go to: The Complete Works.