What Time Is Love?
"Unbeknown to most people there is not a single accepted way of telling the time, but several different scales running concurrently. The differences are usually small, but the scales can be as much as 30 seconds apart and the gap between them is growing steadily. " An article in the Guardian from June 26th about the inherent problem with time.
It's subjective. Funny, that.
Since 1967, atomic clocks have been the de facto standard for keeping time with their measurement of a specific number of cycles of radiation which correspond to the transition between two energy levels of the ground state of Cesium-133. That would be 9,192,631,770 cycles. The International System of Units came up with that number. This is International Atomic Time. Which is different from Coordinated Universal Time which is altered slightly to keep pace with the astronomical shift between night and day. Since the Moon is gradually slowing the Earth down, these two times are moving apart which is causing some problems.
Occassionally leap seconds will be interjected into the CUT time to bring it current. Which is all fine and dandy and means that every once in a while, we scamper ahead a few seconds. Like on December 31, 1998 when we jumped forward 31 seconds. And the mix has been good. However, the satellite global positioning system used for navigation uses a different time scale, and that one is about 13 seconds off right now.
The International Telecommunication Union has set up a working group to talk through the oncoming crisis. Later this year, the Galileo GPS system, will be launched in Europe, adding another standard which will have to be dealt into the mix. Eventually, we'll all be on a different time scale and no one will be able to agree on whether or not anything happened at any given time. There will be no external observers, just internal subjective observations of the universe.