On Thursday, May 21, 2015 at 2:58:23 AM UTC+1, Sam Wormley wrote:


INTERNATIONAL EARTH ROTATION AND REFERENCE SYSTEMS SERVICE (IERS)


It is not possible to determine constancy in the Earth's rotation within the calendar framework as Flamsteed and his contemporaries tried to do when rushing to a false conclusion -

"... our clocks kept so good a correspondence with the Heavens that I
doubt it not but they would prove the revolutions of the Earth to be
isochronical... " John Flamsteed

When they assumed that the Earth was into its next full rotation after 23 hours 56 minutes 04 seconds it led to a belief that the Earth's rotation falls out of step with each 24 hour day as the accumulative 3 minute 56 second difference transfers to a gruesome notion still retained in empirical circles -

"During one orbit around the Sun, Earth rotates about its own axis 366.26 times" Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth


At the same time we have these academics telling everyone how accurate their clocks are leading to the assertion that the Earth is slowing, the academics can't determine the number of times the planet turns in respect to its orbital circumference even though that proportion was implied by the introduction of the leap day rotation.

Who,for goodness sake, could stand by and watch an entire society continue to make fools of themselves for an error that takes literally nothing to correct. The natural extension of the leap day correction which centers the Earth's rotation close to its orbital parameter is not a 'leap second' but rather the refinement currently taken up with the flawed notion of 'axial precession'.

Leap second adjustments are fine as long as they are recognized as a timekeeping facility within the calendar framework but not as a means to assert that the Earth's rotation is constant,slowing down or speeding up.