| > We don't use TAI in everyday use because it's constantly and continuously changing in small ways to account for the tiny accelerations or decelerations in Earth's rotation, and that's annoying for computers. So instead we use UTC. Wait, what? TAI is the one time standard that doesn't change. It's just a bunch of atomic clocks averaged together. As monotonic as human kind is able to manufacture, at this time. UTC is TAI+varying offset in an effort to stay close to mean solar time. The varying offset of UTC, called leap seconds, is what's annoying to computers. If we ran computers on TAI, they would be simpler! And "data center time" tends to be something approximating UTC, with leap seconds smeared into continuous adjustments, just because UTC is annoying to computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time#Mean_solar_time |
That is not the complete story. The calculation used to average the clocks has changed over time, thus amending TAI. The "perfect monotonic" time you're talking about is TT (terrestrial time), not TAI.