Are you sure that there are 24 hours in a day? What do scientists say about this

We are taught from childhood that the day consists of 24 hours and this truth is considered by many to be immutable. In fact, this is not the case and the number " 24 " is accepted all over the world only because of its convenience. Scientists have long known that this value is very approximate and completely unsuitable for the exact sciences. So how much time is there in a day?

A day is a period of time during which our Earth makes a complete revolution around its axis. No matter how much we would like it, but this time is not 24 hours – the earth's day is shorter and there are 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds in them. So accept the fact that you were deceived and you lived for many years among this lie.

But these are not all the secrets of time that we are ready to tell you. It turns out that the duration of the day is not constant and can change in one direction or another for as much as 50 seconds. This is due to the fact that the speed of rotation of our planet is constantly changing and it is influenced by geological and weather phenomena and even human activity!

It turns out that on average, the duration of the day during the year is very close to 24 hours, but still less by one second. It was not easy to" catch " the discrepancy in time, but it was possible to do it with the help of an accurate atomic clock. Now the second is defined as a fixed part of the "solar day", or rather, the millionshest hundred-forty thousandth.

The new second was officially recognized in 1967 and its definition is such that the brain can explode: "the time interval equal to 9 192 631 770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom in the absence of disturbance by external fields."

After determining the second, it became clear that the solar day is gradually shifting in relation to the atomic ones. To avoid discrepancies, physicists introduced a "leap second" (the second of coordination), which is introduced in the atomic year to coordinate it with the solar one.

For the first time, the "leap second" was applied in 1972 and since then it has been resorted to 23 times. If we didn't do this, then our day would increase by half a minute. It seems that this is insignificant, but for many branches of production and science, such an error plays a huge role.

To date, the "leap second" has not been used for a long time. The last time it was used was on December 31, 2005, at the direction of the International Service for Assessing the Parameters of Rotation and Coordinates of the Earth. It is a very important scientific organization based at the Paris Observatory.

Not everyone is happy with the introduction of the second of coordination. If it solves many problems for scientists, then it is only a hindrance in the field of telecommunications. In 2007, an official proposal was received from the International Telecommunications Union to abolish the "leap second", but it was not approved.

I must say that in order to bring the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to a common value, you need to wait until the difference between them accumulates and amounts to exactly an hour. Only now it will happen more than 400 years later.