Who Decides What Time It Is?

How do we know what the real time is?

Not the time on your phone. But the real time of the Earth that all clocks follow. Well turns out that not only is there 1 true clock, but also someone occasionally makes it inaccurate. And that causes the strangest problems.

Let me explain.

So the first time we standardised time, was based on the Sun's position observed from London. This is Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. But in 1955 we created an atomic clock, which uses the vibrations of Cesium. This method takes hundreds of centuries to be off by a single second. Unless someone were to tamper with it.

This new atomic clock became the standard Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. But sailors use GMT, to calculate their position.

And instead of fixing that, someone decided it would be better to add a second to UTC every few years so it matched GMT. Computers hate that, but it's...

Sources: https://digg.com/2015/extra-second-june-30