Megan pointed me at this story, Time for change? GMT could be history "For more than 120 years GMT has been the international standard for timekeeping, but it is now under threat from a new definition of time itself based not on the rotation of the Earth, but on atomic clocks. In January 2012, the International Telecommunication Union will meet in Geneva to vote on whether to adopt the new measure, despite protests from Britain."
I didn't think there would be much of a difference as we deal with leap-seconds only every few years. But it went on to say: "That would see atomic time slowly diverge from GMT, by about one minute every 60 to 90 years, or by an hour every 600 years, and there would need to be "leap minutes" a couple of times a century to bring the two in line."
Somehow leap-minutes seem like more of pain to deal with, but maybe not. The other night I went to a talk at MIT about the faster than light neutrino experiment. The issue there is that the neutrinos travelled 732km and arrive 60 nanoseconds ahead of prediction. One thing that came through was that physicists were perfectly comfortable dealing with time measurements of that size. They can measure several orders of magnitude shorter times.
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