Don’t worry, you’ll barely even notice it.
Even though we know they’re coming, the two days on which the clocks either go forward or back every year are the source of great panic.
Do we get an extra hour or an hour less in bed? Will we get an hour of extra drinking time in the pub or will we be turfed out an hour early?
You’d think we’d know what happens by now but we can guarantee it’ll continue to confuse people on an annual basis forever more.
So, you can imagine what the reaction will be like to an unscheduled changing of the clocks next Tuesday, which will be longer than every other day of 2015 (apart from the day on which the clocks go back by an hour)… by one whole second.
In a move designed to keep up with the tiny alterations to the Earth’s spin, an extra second will be added to this coming Tuesday to ensure that our atomic clocks are in order.
In layman’s terms, the rotation of the Earth is gradually slowing down all the time, meaning that the length of an average, or ‘solar’ day is getting longer on an annual basis, if only by the tiniest of tiny amounts.
To keep up with this, international timekeepers have to add an extra second to the length of a random day every now and again and next Tuesday will be the 26th time it’s occurred since the practise began in 1972.
If this practise didn’t exist, according to the UK National Measurement Office, our atomic clock would be two minutes out of sync by the year 2100.
An extra second might not sound like a big deal, but it caused huge problems for internationally-renowed websites such as LinkedIn and Reddit when a second was last added to a day in 2012 and it wreaked havoc with Australian airline Qantas’ online booking system.
Some of the world’s most prominent official timekeepers have suggested abandoning the idea of the ‘leap second’ entirely because of the potential loss of millions in the international stock market caused by the delay, but it looks set to stay in place until 2020 at least.
When you tell someone you’ve had a long day next Tuesday, the evidence is there to back you up.
Hat-tip to the Irish Times
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