10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and 1 again, happy new year! (Image: Joe Cornish/GETTY)
AT MIDNIGHT on New Year’s Eve, time will stop momentarily. Guardians of atomic clocks around the world will add an extra “leap second” to 2008 to keep time synched with the Earth’s rotation. Arguably, the rise of GPS makes this tweak unnecessary.
In 1972, global commerce began to set its clocks by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), based on the oscillations of the caesium atom. The snag was that other things, such as shipping and aircraft navigation, still relied on UT1 time,…
