The Time Lord, Hero of the People

It is with great pleasure that we introduce you all to another Hero of the People, the Time Lord, a.k.a Peter Whibberley. He was instrumental in agreeing, along with an international panel of scientists, that the earth's rotations and the atomic clocks which he cares for were falling out of sync, and in getting another leap second added to 2008. Incidentally, since 1973 there have been 23 leap seconds. We hesitate to think what would happen to society without these carefully-placed leap seconds. As the Time Lord himself said,

Ultimately, over many hundreds of years if leap seconds were scrapped, the time of night and day would drift away from the time shown by our clocks, so if nothing was done to bring them back into line, night would be happening at midday as shown by the clocks.

We are sure the people of the year 67,712* will be grateful for the Time Lord's foresight in preventing their midnight from happening at noon and vice versa**. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not inspired by the things our scientists do for us!

*In 35 years there have been 23 leap seconds. For the purposes of this calculation, we assume this rate to be constant. There are 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, and we would need 12 hours worth of leap seconds to switch midnight to noon, so we have (12 hours*60 minutes/hour*60 seconds/minute*35 years)/23 seconds=65,739 years. Add in 1973, and you get the year 67,712 when, if leap seconds were abolished, noon and midnight would be swapped.

**Update: Apparently our assumption that the rate of leap seconds remains constant over time is incorrect. It apparently grows at a quadratic rate, putting the year in which noon and midnight are swapped much sooner. See the comments for details.