14 DAY TRIAL // As it turns out, taking a day off from work on June 30 will land you an extra second of rest or partying, depending on what your idea of relaxing might be. This is because this day of the year will be precisely one second longer than any other.
For those who aren't in the mood to do any math, what this means is that, whereas all the other days of the year will be precisely 86,400 seconds long, June 30, 2015 will have 86,401 seconds, and not because scientists are in the mood to play the anarchists, but for a perfectly good reason.
So, why are we adding an extra second to this year's June 30?
The brainiacs who came up with the idea to add a second to June 30 explain that, for quite a while now, our planet's rotation has been slowing down every so slightly. More precisely, it has been slowing by approximately two thousandths of a second each and every day.
The thing is that the atomic clocks that we use to measure time and that are freakishly accurate never ever slow down or pick up speed. What this means is that, at some point in the future, they risk becoming out of sync with Earth's rotation, Science Alert informs.
True, we're going about a hundred dozen extra miles when saying this, but the fact of the matter is that, if simply let be, atomic clocks might just become so out of sync with the planet's rotation that they could say that it's noon when, in fact, it's midnight. Spooky, right?
The scientific community has been adding leap seconds to years since 1972. A total of 26 leap seconds have been added so far, the last one of the bunch in 2012. It is understood that the extra second for 2015 is scheduled at 11:59:59 UTC (coordinated universal time).
Mind you, it's important to note that, apart from a leap second, there is also a so-called leap year. Thus, once every four years, February gets an extra day, which is added to the calendar to sync our calendars with Earth's actual rotation around the Sun.
This is done because, whereas we humans think of the year as having a perfect 365 days, the truth is that it actually takes our planet 365.2422 days to complete an orbit around its parent star. If this extra day were not added once every four years, our calendars and the seasons would eventually have little in common.
Some fear the leap second will mess up computer systems
In 2012, when a leap second was last added to a year, computer systems had serious trouble coping with the modification, and companies such as LinkedIn and Reddit were seriously hit. This happened because, via the Network Time Protocol, computers sync themselves up with the atomic clocks.
During the leap second, the 59th second was either shown twice or, even more bizarre, a 60th second was displayed. Computers saw this as a system error and all sorts of disruptions ensued. Apparently, some fear that the same thing will happen this year.