| > UTC with leap seconds isn't "reality" Weeks aren't reality. Timezones aren't reality. Julian/Gregorian calendar months aren't reality. But they are essential. Calendars, centralised time, and timezones drive coordinated human socialisation and commerce, increasing the wealth of all nations. Countries have switched timezones so that their "work day" matches another more prosperous country's "work day" Humans want, and have always wanted, a compromise between their activities, and the unalterable reality of nature. We have "daylight savings time" because if we say "work is between 9AM and 5PM", that allows for the synchronised commerce - you can phone another business at 9AM because you both start work at 9AM, and 9AM = 9AM for both of you. But the reality is that in the winter months, everyone is going to work or leaving work in darkness, with no daylight time for socialisation. So you shift your entire country's (or state's) offset from an absolute clock, to turn "9AM to 5PM" into "8AM to 4PM" without actually stating that, because if businesses started varying their hours, they'd desync completely and you'd never get business done again. It hasn't been that long since we accepted centralised time, only really since the invention of railways, and especially since the invention of the telegraph. Prior to that, local solar time ruled. Bram Stoker was particulary upset that Ireland was 25 minutes out of alignment with Great Britain (Dublin Mean Time vs Greenwich Mean Time), in his view Ireland was missing out on a lot of trade [0] I don't think we're going to move to a time source that will slowly desync us from nature. If we liked being desynced from nature, we've have ditched DST by now - we haven't. And we also haven't gone entirely back to nature and made it 9:30 in Dublin when it's 9:55 in London. I think we're going to remain on this middle path - fudging the mixture of atomic time and alignment with solar time - for the rest of our days on this planet. [0] https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/turning-back-the-economic-c... |
And we ignore all of those in computer "system" clocks, and track them in a secondary local time layer, quite rightly. We should have handled leap seconds the same way.