What’s in a second?

People living in the world’s most populous areas would have enjoyed Saturday’s “leap second” either at the breakfast table in China or in bed in India, oblivious of the minute adjustment to super-accurate atomic clocks at midnight Greenwich Mean Time (5.30 am IST Sunday).

An additional few seconds in someone’s life may not add up to much despite the frequency of such changes in our post-modern era. The process to keep the calendar in sync with seasons — lest our timekeeping fall way behind the earth’s far from constant elliptical path around its life-giving sun — should serve the 21st century’s more sophisticated tasks like satellite navigation, computer systems that run the Internet, banking networks and international air traffic.

Beyond the seconds gained in a lifetime, mankind must consider itself extremely fortunate to live in what is known as the “Goldilocks Zone” of the universe. Had earth been a little nearer to the sun, temperatures would have been intolerably high. Had earth been a little away, temperatures would have been far below an Arctic chill. Neither climatic extremes could have supported human life as we have come to know it in the past 50,000 years or so of full behavioural modernity in homo sapiens.

Such accurate time standards are vital for professional astronomers who gaze at the sky in wonder and awe through telescopes timed to point in the right direction. Man’s philosophical conjecture over time encompassing science, philosophy, mythology and religion should serve the larger aim of pointing out how fortunate indeed we are.