Rotating Events in Our Time

Our time is shaped in different ways by spinning events regardless of whether it’s the Earth’s rotation around the Sun, or the shift workers who switch between evenings and days. Some of these events occur every day, while others are more unpredictable and more irregular.

For instance, the majority of people are aware that the Earth revolves around the Sun each day for 24 hours. It is not widely known that the speed of rotation can vary and make the day appear shorter or longer than it should. This is the reason that atomic clocks that keep a standard time have to be periodically adjusted by adding or subtracting seconds. This is known as a leap second.

One of the more regular periodic events that rotate is precession, which is the cyclical wobble that occurs on the Earth’s axis of rotation similar to a slightly off-center spinning toy top. This axial shift in relation to fixed stars (inertial spaces) has the duration of 25,771.5. It is responsible for a variety of weather patterns, for example, the alternating direction between cyclones on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

Scientists right here have also observed that the speed at that the Earth turns slows over long periods of time, which causes the solar days to grow longer. On June 29th the world added an additional leap second to the atomic clocks to better align them with the rotation of the Earth. Although the addition of one second may seem like a minor thing, it has important implications for businesses that depend on rotating alter schedules. For instance multinational companies that rely on the world’s workforce, having to fumble through spreadsheets and static wiki pages to manage the changing schedules of calls can easily become expensive in terms of revenue and reputation. On-call rotation software is becoming more popular since it minimizes interruptions to service, manages transfer coverage, and offers transparency to employees.