Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Well, the BIPM doesn't really want anybody to use TAI, their director said as much last year, and I can see where he is coming from on that one.
Ed Davies asked:
Since the usual response of the pro-leap second lobby to people who want a uniform timescale is "use TAI" this is significant. Do you have any information or references on why the BIPM director said this?
Poul-Henning Kamp replied:
As I understood it, it was mainly that TAI is a post-factum "postal" timescale.
Well, yes, at well below the one microsecond level (10s of nanoseconds I think). The same would apply to UTC, of course, given that it's defined by an offset from TAI and I doubt he meant the world should stop using UTC. Of course, in the real world people don't directly use UTC anyway - they use UTC(NIST) or UTC(NPL) or whatever local approximation is good enough for their purposes. This would be true for any timescale. Ed.
