I went to my local planetarium recently and learnt that the earth to moon distance increases by 38mm each year, while the earth rotation slows down very slightly. Obviously not a significant amount to mean anything right now, but what will happen in the future when it will make a difference? How will people just “add time” to hours/days/weeks/months and so forth?
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Most people don’t know, and it’s largely invisible to them so why would they, that we often add a leap second to compensate for the difference between our standard time and “real time”. Since the early 1970s this has happened almost 30 times.
Now that we have computers and mobile devices synchronizing time over the Internet to Standard sources which are themselves synced to atomic clock sources this happens quickly and transparently.
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