Saturday Extended Extra Second

On Saturday, official timekeepers added an extra second to the clocks. The ‘leap second’ took place just before midnight, at the hitherto nonexistent 11:59:60 pm.

The second was added because Earth is spinning 2 milliseconds slower each day than it was 100 years ago. In a year, the extra time adds up to nearly one second.

Photo from Flickr.com. Uploaded by wwarby.

John Lowe heads the time and frequency services at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In an article by the Los Angeles Times, he explained why the leap second was necessary.

“The seconds would stack up and ‘sunrise’ would eventually take place at sunset. And ‘spring’ would arrive in the dead of winter,” he said.

With that in mind, I embraced this leap second. I couldn’t help but wonder what all could be accomplished. And while I certainly lived my life to the fullest during my extra time, I wondered what all could have happened during my productive second.

A resting heart beat 1.16 times. A satellite made two round trip communication exchanges. Two fastballs reached home plate, and another was halfway there. A human eye blinked more than three times. The human brain recognized and translated into facial expressions five different emotions. A helicopter’s main rotor made 5.4 rotations. Light traveled around the Earth’s equator about 7.5 times. 24 frames flashed on a screen. A housefly flapped its wings 333 times. Sound traveled 34,000 km. The molecule positronium hydride experienced 2 billion generations. (Comparatively, there have been approximately 5,000 generations of Homo sapiens.) An IBM Silicon-Germanium transistor executed one trillion machine cycles.

A new universe (assuming the multiverse theory is correct) expanded from infinitesimal to over 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters . . . in its first second.

What did I do with my extra second? The original idea for this blog popped into my head.