The Future of Time: UTC and the Leap Second

rlseaman writes: "UTC ("Coordinated Universal Time") is very close to being redefined to no longer track Earth rotation. Clocks everywhere — on your wall, wrist, phone or computer — would stop keeping Solar time. See the article in the July-August 2011 "American Scientist" magazine: "Before atomic timekeeping, clocks were set to the skies. But starting in 1972, radio signals began broadcasting atomic seconds and leap seconds have occasionally been added to that stream of atomic seconds to keep the signals synchronized with the actual rotation of Earth. Such adjustments were considered necessary because Earth's rotation is less regular than atomic timekeeping. In January 2012, a United Nations-affiliated organization could permanently break this link by redefining Coordinated Universal Time."
(Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.3141)"