- I'm just outside the town of Gudhjem on the northeast coast
of Bornholm in Denmark. It's a little out of the way. To get to this point from Copenhagen I had to drive across the Oresund bridge
and through Sweden... GPS: "Take the second exit and stay on
'Dag-hammer-schultz-vag'." ...then take a 90 minute ferry ride,
and then drive across the island. But this island, or more specifically,
a north-south line across this island starting right here, is the only
bit of Denmark that is exactly 15 degrees east of Greenwich in London,
exactly 1/24th of the way around the Earth. which means that the sun
is highest in the sky here exactly one hour before Greenwich. This lines defines
Central European Time for Denmark. To explain why there's
a problem with that, we need to talk to someone
back where I started. - The observatory we are seeing here used to be the official
timekeeping of Denmark, so it actually provided what time
the national time in Denmark was. In 1893 a law was
put in effect in Denmark, at which point the time of Denmark was
synchronised with international time zones. So at that point in time, communications,
transportation across borders had become so fast, so international
that it was becoming a problem that every country had its
own national timescale. - Back before railways and
modern telecommunications, every town and village in the world
ran on its own time. 12 o'clock was when the sun was highest
in the sky, on average, wherever you were. That's called mean solar noon. Once the world started to
move fast enough, though, every town and village having
its own time became a problem. And steadily over decades, governments
agreed that the official legal time would be the same in each region,
in each time zone. And that each time zone would be offset
by a round number compared to the time
at Greenwich in London. The closest round number to Copenhagen
was one hour, 15 degrees east, and so Denmark chose that. The clocks everywhere in the country were
changed to agree with mean solar noon at this line. But then along came the Information Age, and it turned out that
wasn't quite good enough because the Earth wobbles. - Earth wobbles a bit in its rotation and that means that it's not exactly
the same all year round, and more than that, Earth rotation
also slows a bit over time because of tidal forces from the Moon. If we were actually, in Denmark
to follow our own time, like our mean solar time, we would be off with some
hundredths of a second, and this would actually make it difficult for Danish financial
companies, for instance, to actually trade on stock markets. - Once humanity had got the ability
to track the Earth's rotation precisely we found out that noon drifts a little, by a tiny and different
fraction of a second each day. And when computers, and clocks,
and scientists around the world need to be accurate to within
that tiny fraction of a second, that's a problem. So the scientific community agreed
to ignore the wobble and created
Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, which doesn't care about
the Earth's movement. To your phone, your computer
and to your bank, to basically everyone
apart from astronomers, a day is precisely 86,400 seconds. As measured by the average of a network
of atomic clocks around the world. If you want to be really detailed, then on screen
is the full formal definition of a day. And every time the Earth's wobble
threatens to drift out of sync with our standard,
we add a leap second to UTC, either skipping a second
or counting a second twice to get UTC back in line
with the annoyingly real Earth and stars. The catch is, [sighs] Denmark
never updated its laws. - The official law in Denmark is defined
by a law from 1893 which states that Denmark follows mean solar time. In reality Denmark follows the
Universal Coordinated Time, the atomic clock time which is used
all around the world. So I made a petition to
Parliament in Denmark to try to change this law. Some Danish media took up this story and following that, a member
of the Danish Parliament actually made a question to the minister, and the minister then said that he was actually interested
in looking into this and maybe make changes to the law. - As I record this, the error is tiny, it's only about .04 seconds, but that's just based on when I happen
to be filming here. By the time this video goes live, the error is predicted to
be at about .06 seconds. By the end of the year, it'll be
about a quarter of a second. I've written some code that will keep
checking the clocks and automatically update the title of this video as we go. At least until the code breaks
and I can't be bothered to fix it anymore. The error could get all the way
to .9 seconds before a leap second
arrives to correct it. But it's not like phones, and computers
and stock exchanges here in Denmark follow Danish law. They don't
pay attention to the stars. They all just use UTC instead,
and ignore the outdated legislation. So does it matter? - I think that laws should in general be in accordance with reality [laughs] and if not you should at least decide that we want to
keep it this way actively. Denmark does not have any official
time laboratory, so we rely on the time services
from neighbouring countries. This may put us at a disadvantage
compared to other countries. - If everyone agrees to ignore a law, and the government doesn't care
to enforce it, that's fine. As long as the government
keeps deciding not to enforce that law and also to ignore the hypocrisy that government is ignoring its own laws. Fixing that shouldn't be the highest thing on the priority list, but it'd be nice to do it at some point. After all the United States moved to UTC
in 2007 with the America COMPETES Act. And the UK... Ah. Er. [clears throat] Y'know, it's probably not a good time to bother the British
government right now. It can wait. We've got time.
