Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
A brief history of timekeeping reveals the need for leap day, leap seconds, and the neverending challenge of synchronizing clocks around the world
You might expect Andrew Novick to be the punctual sort. After all, he’s an electrical engineer who back in 1999 created the time.gov web clock that reveals the official exact time across all US time zones. But Novick is seldom on time, and like many of us, he wishes there were more of it. “There’s definitely not enough time in the day,” he says during our conversation about today’s phenomenally accurate timekeeping contrasted with the seemingly archaic need to add leap days — and even leap seconds — to make it so.
It’s not that Novick isn’t precise. As a guy who creates and implements time measurement systems and helps keep atomic clocks calibrated for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), he just likes to squeeze a lot into his days.
“I always know what time it is,” he says with confidence. “I know how late I am.”
Creative time management aside, Novick and his colleagues at NIST and around the world scrupulously measure the passage of every second and compare notes so they always know exactly what time it is — or at least what time it…
