In message: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: : In this case there are really two questions: how much it would : cost to loosen DUT1 but leave it bounded, and how much it would : cost if it were only statistically, not absolutely, bounded.
We've accepted a statistical solution for the leap-day problem now for about 500 years. There are minor variations, and over the next 10's of thousands of years this simple solution may not prove workable (it will be off by more than a day on the average in about 8,000 years if nothing is done). Right now winter solstice can be off by over a day from the mean either direction, yet over the long haul things average out. There's no call for there to be leap days scheduled at the whim of the astronomers anymore... Seems like a logical leap for leap seconds to follow, if the costs aren't prohibitive. Chances are that one person knows all the users of time that still need DUT1 to be less than 1s. One big area of change would be the time and frequency stations, like WWV, since they currently broadcast DUT1, or variations of it. But the correction they broadcast is good only to 100ms typically (time-nuts@ have documented cases where it was worse than 100ms when some national time lab didn't update the data transmitted when they were supposed to), so maybe some other means of distribution is necessary... And is 100ms really good enough? Warner