【小知识】
根据国际地球自转服务组织公告，格林尼治时间6月30日全世界的时间将多出一秒，即闰秒。地处东八时区的中国，将在北京时间7月1日早8时增加1秒，全国的钟表将调慢一秒钟。出现7：59：60的特殊现象，然后才是8：00：00。这多出来的1秒钟就是“闰秒”，是全世界科学家们为了校正地球自转速度变化带来的时差而增加的1秒钟，今年增加的闰秒，是1972年以来全球第26次。
Airlines, trading floors and technology companies are braced for chaos today as world timekeepersprepare to add a leap second to global clocks.
世界钟表今天要给全球的钟表加一“闰秒”，因此航班、交易所、科技公司正在为即将到来的混乱备战。
Immediately before midnight, dials will read 11:59:60 as clocks hold their breath for a second toallow the Earth's rotation to catch up with atomic time.
为了使地球自转和原子时间吻合，午夜的前一刻，时钟将会凝滞一秒，表盘将会因此显示出11:59:60。
When the last leap second was added in 2012, Mozilla, Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp, linkedIn, andStumbleUpon all reported crashes and there were problems with the Linux operating system andprograms written in Java. In Australia, more than 400 flights were grounded as the Qantas check-in system crashed.
上一次添加闰秒是在2012年，当时Mozilla, Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp, linkedIn和StumbleUpon都有故障报告，Linux操作系统和Java编程也出现了问题。澳洲航空的安检系统崩溃导致澳大利亚超过400架航班取消。
Experts at Britain's National Physical Laboratory (NPL) who will officially add the second to UK time,warned that markets which are already jittery from Greece could suffer transaction delays if theirsoftware was not prepared.
英国国家物理实验室(NPL)的专家将正式把闰秒加进英国时间，他们警告称，如果系统没有做好充分准备，被希腊危机搅得不堪一击的股市将会遭受交易延迟。
"There are consequences of tinkering with time," said Peter Whibberley, Senior Research Scientistin the Time and Frequency group at NPL, who is known to colleagues as "The Time Lord."
英国国家物理实验室时间和频率组的资深科研家彼得·韦博利(Peter Whibberley)被同事们称为“时间之神”，他说：“如果不妥善处理时间的话，后果将不堪设想。”
"Because leap seconds are only introduced sporadically, it is difficult to implement them incomputers and mistakes can cause systems to fail temporarily.
添加闰秒的情况很少见，所以很难把它补在电脑里，稍有差错，系统就会暂时性瘫痪。
"Getting leap seconds wrong can cause loss of synchronization in communication networks,financial systems and many other applications which rely on precise timing. Whenever a leapsecond occurs, some computer systems encounter problems due to glitches in the code written tohandle them. The consequences are particularly severe in the Asia-Pacific region, where leapseconds occur during normal working hours."
7月1日
闰秒处理不当会导致通信网络、金融体系和其他依赖精确时间计量的应用出现不同步的状况。闰秒的出现会在修复问题的编码里引发细微的差错，所以部分电脑系统就会出现问题。而其后果在亚太地区更为严重，因为该地区是在正常工作时间出现闰秒的。
European markets including London are largely closed when the event is scheduled to occur, butthe change will hit trading floors in the US, Japan, Australia, South Korea and Singapore.
包括伦敦在内的大部分欧洲市场确定闰秒将要出现后都关停了。但是这样的变化会影响美国、日本、澳大利亚、韩国和新加坡的交易所。
To make matters more complicated, stock exchanges are approaching the leap second differently,with Asian markets planning to trade as normal, while US exchanges are expected to stop activityearly.
股票交易市场处理闰秒的不同策略更是忙中添乱，因为亚洲市场打算正常交易，而美国市场则计划提前停止交易活动。
Dr Leon Lobo, Strategic Business Development Manager at NPL added:"Anyone who conductstransactions with those markets when the change occurs could have a synchronization issue ifthey are not ready."
英国国家物理实验室的战略业务发展经理莱昂·罗博(Leon Lobo)博士说：“如果市场没有准备好，那么在变化发生时和那些市场进行交易的人可能会遇到时间同步的问题。”
Many computing systems use the Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to keep themselves in sync withthe world’s atomic clocks. But most are not programmed to deal with an unexpected extrasecond.
很多计算系统用的都是网络时间协议(NTP)，以保证他们和世界原子时钟是同步的。但是大多数系统的编程无法处理这多出来的“不速之秒”。
Google has even developed a special technique to deal with what it refers to as a "leap smear" andhas been gradually adding milliseconds to its system clocks prior to the official arrival of the leapsecond. BT's speaking clock will add a second's pause before its third pip.
谷歌甚至开发了一种特殊技术来处理所谓的“闰秒”，并且在闰秒正式到来前逐步在自己的系统中加入毫秒。BT的语音时钟会在报时第三响之前加一秒的暂停。
Atomic time is constant, but the Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down by around twothousandths of a second per day.
原子时间是恒定的，但是地球的自转速度每天大约会下降千分之二秒。
Leap seconds are therefore essential to ensuring civil time does not drift away from time based onthe Earth's spin. If not corrected, such a drift would eventually result in clocks showing the middleof the day occurring at night.
所以，闰秒在保证民用时和自转时(依据地球自转而计算的时间)之间的一致性上起到了重要的作用。如果不更正二者之间的误差，最终会导致时钟在半夜的时候显示正午的时间。
