Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Rigorous Science

What would it take to make a scientific second equal exactly one traditional second?

+0
−0

A scientist is resetting the clock on his microwave one day as he considers the hopelessness of keeping the time exactly right. Not for the reasons we worry about like power outages and daylight savings times, but because in the back of his head, he knows that Earth's movements through space are not properly standardized for good time keeping system.

This makes him unreasonably mad, so he decides that the best way to correct for this aberration is to simply alter the spin and orbital period of the earth so that a day is exactly 86400 seconds and a year is exactly 365 days based on caesium frequencies so that he never has to worry about converting units again.

Although the historical definition of the unit (seconds) was based on this division of the Earth's rotation cycle, the formal definition in the International System of Units (SI) is a much steadier timekeeper: it is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency ∆νCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.1[2] Because the Earth's rotation varies and is also slowing ever so slightly, a leap second is periodically added to clock time[nb 1] to keep clocks in sync with Earth's rotation. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second

So, our mad scientist devises a two step plan to unify metric and traditional time once and for all! The first stage it to use a series of powerful explosions to speed up/ slow down the Earth's movements to make days and seconds the right lengths, the second it to install propulsion systems on the Earth to keep it moving at these speeds indefinitely.

The Question: How much force (and in what directions) does the scientist need to exert on the Earth to achieve his goals?

Bonus points if new seconds actually = scientific seconds when rounded to the level of a double floating-point number, but I would be surprised if anyone could actually find measurements on the Earth accurate enough to do this, so no pressure.

Caveats based on Comments:

How long is indefinitely?

If additional thrust needs to be added over time, the scientist trusts future generations (assuming he hasn't killed everyone) to continue his work. His initial thruster just needs to be strong enough to make sure that he doesn't start seeing desync start creeping back in before his own end-of-life. If thrust needed decreases over time, assume his thruster can throttle down to compensate.

the explosions and "propulsion" would probably devastate the biosphere at worst it might even generate enough energy to melt the crust and boil the oceans to a significant extent.

Devastation does not necessarily need to be addressed for purposes of this question unless it involves there not being an Earth left to have a day/night cycle.

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/161591. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

0 comment threads

0 answers

Sign up to answer this question »