'Leap second' to pause clocks at midnight as entire planet gains a second.

-Time and tide wait for no man, the saying goes. But at midnight on Tuesday clocks will pause momentarily as the entire planet gains a bonus second.

If you happen to be awake, and gazing at the dial on an atomic clock, it will read 23:59:60 before ticking forward to 00.00.00.

The addition of a “leap second” is designed to allow the Earth’s rotation, which is gradually slowing, to catch up with atomic clocks, keeping official time neatly in sync with night and day. But trade floors, tech companies and those in charge of the internet are bracing themselves for potentially calamitous computer glitches linked to the 61-second minute.

“There are consequences [to] tinkering with time,” said Peter Whibberley, a senior scientist at the National Physical Laboratory, which is now responsible for defining Greenwich Mean Time. “Because leap seconds are only introduced sporadically it is difficult to implement them in computers and mistakes can cause systems to fail temporarily.”


                                                         //youngtime//