By SCOTT DEWING
Published: December 2004

THE PROBLEM WITH TIME is that it doesn’t actually exist. This may have something to do with why we never feel like we have enough of it.

“It’s a generated thing, not a naturally occurring phenomenon we’re just monitoring. We actually make time,” said Ronald Beard, a physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, in a recent interview in Discover magazine.

Our fascination and dependency on time has evolved considerably during the past millennia. The Egyptians were the first to make use of the sundial. Measuring the passage of time by the sun’s shadow, they divided a “day” into 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness, noting that the intervals represented by those hours changed with the seasons. Some time later the Greeks used water clocks, which measured the outflow of water from a vessel as a measure of time. During the Sung Dynasty, the Chinese used burning incense to measure the passage of time.

It wasn’t until the 14th century that mechanical clocks were invented and an “hour” became a uniform measure of time. In 1949, the National Bureau of Standards built the first atomic clock using ammonia. In 1967, the “second” was formally defined as 9,192,631,770 vibrations of a cesium atom, marking the first time that time was no longer defined by the movement of celestial bodies. However, even this atomic clock had to be calibrated to either the Earth’s rotation or its orbit. The Earth’s orbit was used because scientists decided it provided a more uniform timescale.

The atomic measure of time caused problems with celestial navigation, which was still being used in the 1960s, because it failed to account for the slowing of the Earth’s rotation. “[Atomic time] was so uniform that it didn’t conform to the non-uniform length of the day,” said Beard. It was discovered that the second based on atomic resonance was actually shorter than the second based on the length of the day. To correct this problem, an international community of scientists agreed in 1972 to begin adding “leap seconds” to atomic time so that the “civil” timescale was consistent with the length of day. At the time, they had no idea the problems these tiny little leap seconds were going to cause for an increasingly technology driven, computer-based society.

Today, a total of 22 leap seconds have been “added” to the sacred atomic clocks around the world. The problem with this is that many time-based systems, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), use uncorrected atomic time. Opponents of the leap second say that the growing disparity between atomic time, uncorrected atomic time and civil time could result in mid-air collisions of aircraft, disruption of financial markets and disabling of cellular phones.

While those scenarios may seem a bit drastic, they are rooted in the fundamental problem that much of the computer software that drives electronic fund-transfers, air traffic control and satellite communications were not architected with leap seconds in mind. As we become more dependent on these systems and their accuracy, this seemingly tiny leap second problem promises to become a big, time-consuming problem that will need to be resolved.

“A one-second jump can cause significant problems for systems that require continuous, uninterrupted time,” said Beard. That’s why Beard led a group of “time experts” who met earlier this year to discuss ways of redefining time in order to arrive at a solution that will allow us to mold time to our needs.

Meanwhile, the Earth continues spinning indifferent to our invention of computer systems, atomic clocks and meticulous adherence to leap seconds. The seasons come and go. The days get shorter then longer, then shorter again and some days I wonder if all this trouble with precise time-keeping really matters much in an otherwise timeless universe. Perhaps this sentiment is summed up best by one of my favorite poets, Jim Harrison, in this excerpt from his poem “Time Suite”:

Here is time.
In the crotch of limbs
the cow’s skull grew
into the tree
and birds nested in the mouth
year after year…

The actual speed of life
is so much slower
we could have lived
exactly seven times as long
as we did…

On my newly devised calendar
there are only three days a month.
All the rest is space
so that night and day
don’t feel uncomfortable
within my confines.
I’m not pushing them around,
making them do this and that.