As if this year hasn't been bad enough, scientists are making us wait even longer to see the back of it as they adjust the clocks to compensate for a slowdown in the Earth's rotation.
Waving goodbye and good riddance to 2016 will be delayed by a second as clocks will change from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 instead of 00:00:00 as they slip in the extra second.
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Paris decide when leap seconds are needed and this is the 27th time a leap second has been introduced since 1972.
My question would be if the Earth's rotation is so erratic that we have to keep slipping in seconds here and there, and we have had to add almost half a minute over the last 44 years, what about the 4.5 billion years if every 100 years we are out of sync approximately by a minute?
That's about 10 mins every 1000 years, 100 mins every 10,000 years 1000 mins every 100,000 years 10,000 mins every 1,000,000 years...and then my maths fail me but a million years throws us out by 694 days.
If a British billion is a million million then 1 billion x 694 days means up until 1972 we had lost 69,400,000,000,000 days every billion years so over 4.5 billion years that's...whatever, the bottom line is the Earth is more than 4.5 billion years old if you add on the minute every year for 4.5 billion years that have been missed up until 1972.
If this is the case then all the timings we have for the big bang, creation of the stars and planets, the Earth forming, how long the dinosaurs ruled the earth etc are out of whack.
I have emailed the National Physical Laboratory and the International Earth Rotation and Reference Service so will see what comes back from them but until then the calendar makers should be told to hold fire because saying next year is 2017 could be very, very wrong.
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