".....and Leon's getting larrrrrrrger."
Posted on 12/07/2016 2:56:09 PM PST by BenLurkin
The latest findings in Earth science are brought to you by ancient astronomers who observed the heavens as much as 2,700 years ago.
Thanks to hundreds of records of lunar and solar eclipses carved in clay tablets and written into dynastic histories, modern scientists have determined that the amount of time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation on its axis has slowed by 1.8 milliseconds per day over the course of a century, according to a report published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
It may not sound significant, but over the course of 2½ millenniums, that time discrepancy adds up to about 7 hours.
In other words, if humanity had been measuring time with an atomic clock that started running back in 700 BC, today that clock would read 7 p.m. when the sun is directly overhead rather than noon.
“There is time and then there is how fast the Earth spins,” said Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, who was not involved with the work. “Traditionally those things are closely linked, but they are not the same.”
Our earliest ancestors measured time based on the position of celestial bodies in the sky, such as the rising and setting of the sun or the changing shape of the moon. Scientists refer to this as Universal Time, and it is governed by the dynamic gravitational motions of the Earth, moon and sun.
Terrestrial Time, on the other hand, is measured by clocks and is independent of planetary motiont. Since the 1960s, it has been tracked by exquisitely precise atomic clocks. According to our modern take on Terrestrial Time, there are exactly 86,400 seconds in a day and each second is defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium-133 atom.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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If days are getting longer why are they going by faster?
And the clock was invented when?
Gotta be Climate Change.
Maybe longer days are causing global warming
".....and Leon's getting larrrrrrrger."
Trump’s fault.
Cause we are getting older.
When you are 10 years old, a year is one tenth of your life. That’s a huge chunk. Therefore it seems like a lot.
When you are my age, a year is about 2% of your life. Not a huge chunk. Therefore it seems to blink by.
It’s all about perception based on past experiences.
Just my (and my exceptionally intelligent father’s) theory...
Lord knows the last 8 years have been interminable!
Touche’!
We’ll have to consult Al Gore
So does that mean the day was only 17 hrs long back then???
I saw this earlier.
Of course the days are longer. Folks who paid attention in science class knew this in high school.
The Moon is slowly getting further and further away, slowing the spin.
Because life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer to the end you get, the faster it goes..
Oh no
:(
“Just my (and my exceptionally intelligent father’s) theory...”
A very brilliant friend of mine came to the same conclusion. He’s about 20 years older than me ... warned me about the phenomena about 15 years ago when I was in my 20s ... he was 100% right :-).
Yeah, unless there’s some deviation from what’s predicted by Newtonian gravity, this article is dealing with something that has been known for about 3.5 centuries.
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I hope they didn’t get a government grant to figure this out, something that anyone with common sense can reason. Not only is the Earth slowing its rotation, but the Moon is also slowly moving away from Earth. Has something to do with the laws of motion and such, no government grant necessary to figure out that time takes its toll on moving bodies when forces are acting on them.
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