Perfectly syncing clocks across the world is actually impossible because of physics, so things like Leap Seconds are basically just a polite lie.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Why Synchronized Time is a Fiction: Daylight Saving Time, Leap Seconds, and the Guillotine Sharpened for Nothing
arXiv · 2603.19099
The Takeaway
Einstein's theory of relativity proves that a single global "now" cannot exist, yet our civilization spends massive resources trying to make clocks agree. This paper argues that by forcing synchronization, we are trying to preserve a convention that physics says is fundamentally impossible.
From the abstract
Civilization maintains an elaborate infrastructure devoted to the maintenance of synchronized time. Governments mandate daylight saving time. Standards bodies insert leap seconds into Coordinated Universal Time. Engineers debate leap milliseconds and leap nanoseconds. The Global Positioning System applies relativistic corrections at the nanosecond level. All of these adjustments attempt to preserve an assumption: that a single global time exists and that clocks can be made to agree upon it.This