Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, one.
Revellers will have to wait an extra second to ring in the new year because a "leap second" is being added to the last day of 2005.
Leap seconds aren't designed to delay partygoers from pouring the bubbly. They are used to synchronize precise atomic clocks with the more variable rotation of the Earth.
Although the Earth's rotation with respect to the sun has been used since ancient times to know the time of day, it is not like clockwork, and can speed up or slow down by a few thousandths of a second a day.
This means that every day is not precisely 24 hours, or 86,400 seconds. The atomic clocks, high-tech timepieces, establish the official time — known as Coordinated Universal Time — in Canada and around the world. Without leap seconds, Coordinated Universal Time would slowly get out of sync with the time it feels like on Earth.
"We would get out of sync with the sun," says Richard Langley, a University of New Brunswick researcher who is an expert in the complex and bureaucratic science of timekeeping.
"In about 600 years, the difference will be half an hour and in about 1,000 years, the difference will be a full hour," Dr. Langley said in an interview.
That rate of the Earth's rotation can fluctuate for a number of reasons, including lunar tides and atmospheric winds.
Leap seconds were first added in 1972, and a body called the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, in Paris, decides when one is needed.
It tells national time laboratories, like the one at the National Research Council in Ottawa, to insert the extra second, either on the last day of June or the last day of December.
The last leap second was added in 1998. This will be the 23rd one.
But leap seconds are growing more controversial.
At an international meeting in November, U.S. delegates proposed that they be abandoned.
Losing leap seconds would make life simpler for those who have to adjust the time on global navigation satellites.
But the British delegates were hostile to the idea, Dr. Langley says.
The leap second will be added at midnight, Coordinated Universal Time, which is the same as Greenwich Mean Time, or 7 p.m Eastern Standard Time. But if people have set their watches using the 1p.m. EST time signal on the CBC on 31 December, then by midnight everywhere in Canada, they will be one second out, says Dr. Langley. They should adjust their watches at midnight local time to account for the leap second.
People have been adjusting manufactured clocks since they were invented. The first mechanical clocks, used in cathedrals in Europe in the 1300s, were readjusted every day to be in sync with sundials.
