Clifford Heath wrote: "No, the planet is not changing
the rate at which time passes, and it's not affecting our
ability to measure time. "

HOW can you make such a statement???
If the planet is gradually slowing down,
over millions of years as reported, the
period of time from noon to noon(or
midnight to midnight), is getting LONGER.
Our hyper-accurate master clocks have
to account for that somehow.


"Yes, but that has nothing to do with how we improve our ability to
measure time. Remember I was responding to N_Cook's comment:

"The new generation of atomic clocks, accurate to 1 second in 15 billion
years,supposedly - how do they know , without a more accurate clock than
that to check it against?" "

"The earth's slowing is also somewhat chaotic, inasmuch as equatorial
weather affects the sea-level heights, which introduces noise into the
earth's angular moment of inertia, and hence its rate of rotation. That
has nothing however to do with how we know we're measuring time accurately. "

OF COURSE IT DOES!! If our super-accurate
clocks don't account for an inconsistent Earth,
then sunrises, sunsets, and everything else
will start happening later & later by those clocks.
Sunrise in June in Connecticut will come at
5:23, 5:24(Daylight Time)instead of 5:20 as it
has for decades, and sunset - 8:32, 8:33,
instead of 8:30 as it has for years. It's
only adding those periodic seconds that
maintains that symmetry.

That's because of PLANET drift, not clock
drift. And overall, it is slowing down, not
speeding up.