Article
The Leap Second Must Die
The strange bureaucratic afterlife of the extra second.
The second is defined by counting 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom's hyperfine transition. That number was chosen in 1967 to match the old astronomical second — and Earth immediately began drifting away from it, because the planet is an unreliable clock.
Hence the leap second: an occasional extra tick inserted so civil time tracks the slowing Earth. Software hates it. Distributed systems have crashed on leap seconds; Google famously 'smears' the extra second across a day instead of inserting it. In 2022, the metrology community voted to abandon leap seconds by 2035 — a quiet admission that we now trust atoms more than the sky.
Photo: NIST Original uploader was Dakik at cs.wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).