Clock ticking: GMT could be history
Tiny variations between Earth speed and atomic speed have become a problem for GPS, the global positioning systems and mobile phone networks on which the modern world relies.
"These networks need to be synchronised to the millisecond," Dr Arias said. "We are starting to have parallel definitions of time. Imagine a world where there were two or three definitions of a kilogram."
A meeting in London will look at the implications of abolishing the leap seconds required by GMT/UTC and moving fully to atomic time. That would see atomic time slowly diverge from GMT, by about one minute every 60 to 90 years, or by an hour every 600 years, and there would need to be "leap minutes" a couple of times a century to bring the two in line.
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