On Wed 2005/08/03 16:11:06 MST, Rob Seaman wrote in a message to: [email protected]
>3) Clarify the relationship between the civil second and the SI >second. It may be too late to define a new unit of duration - >whether Essen or Fressen - or perhaps it isn't. In any event, there >are 86400 seconds per solar day, and that usage of the word "second" >clearly differs from the SI unit which happens to have the same The fiction that there are 86400 "seconds" in a solar day is part of the problem - noone uses the word "second" in this context. Currently there are about 86400.003 seconds in a mean solar day but we use leap seconds so that we can carry on pretending that there are only 86400. Eventually when there are 86401 seconds in a mean solar day, or probably well before, we'll simply have to stop pretending. Mark Calabretta ATNF
