Letters of Intent received in 2014

LoI 2016-252
Time for astronomy, science and civilization

Topics

Timekeeping is a rich topic in the history of astronomy. From Galileo to Harrison's clocks, and atomic clocks to pulsars, the story of time has been one of technological advancements balancing astronomical phenomena. We propose a program steeped in this history and setting the stage for future timekeeping standards, infrastructure, and engineering best practices for astronomers. Two prior meetings sponsored by the American Astronautical Society (http://futureofutc.org) touched on a subset of these topics, but did so largely outside the astronomical community. We seek to enhance the clarity of vision regarding time within our community.

This is a critical time for time. Next year the International Telecommunication Union (an agency of the United Nations) will again consider a proposal to cease leap seconds, thus redefining Coordinated Universal Time to no longer be tied to Earth Rotation. We do not propose to debate the wisdom of this, and indeed the IAU UTC Working Group reached a divided opinion again this year. Rather, there are important implications for the practice of astronomy should UTC be redefined in 2015 - and there are implications for astronomy if UTC remains unchanged. Thus, depending on intervening events outside the control of astronomers the agenda of this meeting may change significantly.

Rationale

Time is an essential dimension of science and society in too many ways to count. Time is the most frequently used noun in the English language (http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y). Time is of particular importance in astronomy, where the further out you look in space, the further back you see in time. Investigations that rely on time as an independent variable are of ever growing observational importance, but beneath the burgeoning interest in the astronomical time domain remain deep questions regarding time itself. How is time defined? How is it measured? How may time signals be reliably distributed? What does time mean to those who use it? How has the understanding and keeping of time evolved throughout history?

We propose a symposium to look at the broad sweep of time as time itself. This complements time domain astronomy symposia that regard time as fixed, unchangeable - an everyday ingredient provided by ever better clocks and computer networks. Time may be an everyday thing, but it remains ever a mystery. We will reach out to timekeepers and physicists, historians and anthropologists, standards-makers and software engineers to provide context to the use cases and infrastructure, philosophy and science of time in astronomy, and to address how time has tied astronomers to civilization throughout history. Joint sponsors may include the Network Time Foundation (http://www.networktimefoundation.org), the Long Now Foundation (http://longnow.org), and other groups who will cross-fertilize discussions and future initiatives between the astronomical community and others.