Re:With 61 Seconds in a Minute, Markets Brace for Trouble
by jessaustin on Monday June 29, 2015 @10:44AM
(#9798379)
You can see how a 365.248-day year would be inconvenient, right? A 86400.002-second day would be more inconvenient, even though the point of TFA is that a 86401-second day is also somewhat inconvenient.
Seconds are not defined by the rotation of the earth, any more than they're defined by its revolution.
Consider the leap year for a second. We add it because our years have 365 days is slightly incorrect (by about .25 days a year). It isn't that the number of rotations per revolution is or isn't changing. That isn't relevant to our use of a 1 day correction every 4 years. If some force caused us to revolve around the sun slightly faster and it took 365 exact, then we could remove the leap year.
Removing the leap year would be a result of our revolution being slightly faster. But the leap year itself is not.
In short, the delta of the leap correction is a result of the change in the system being monitored, but the leap correction itself is because our system of measurement is off.