A record of how time is decided — the standards bodies, the resolutions, the deadlines, and the corrections nobody publishes. Every factual claim cites a primary document.
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20 September 2026 · Brief
The Clocks Do Not Agree
The redefinition of the second is reported as a story of convergence. The primary documents record a consensus failure, a fourteen-sigma disagreement between the world's best clocks, and a published international standard value that was wrong by more than its own stated uncertainty.
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20 September 2026 · Brief
Three Votes on Time
The 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures meets at Versailles on 13–15 October. Three resolutions before it would end the leap second eight years earlier than the public timetable suggests, acknowledge that optical clocks disagree, and settle how time is kept on the Moon.
The decision calendar
Every dated commitment on the record — the Versailles vote in October, the end of the leap second on 20 May 2027, the lunar time deliverable in December, the 2030 decision on the second — each with the document that sets it.
What this is
Almost everything written for a general audience about time is about physics — relativity, the arrow of time, the twin paradox. That ground is well covered.
Very little is written about the other half: the committees, resolutions, votes and deadlines by which humanity actually decides what time it is. Those decisions are made in public, recorded in documents anyone can download, and are largely unread. When they are reported, the reporting is often wrong in ways that are checkable against the source.
Sothic covers that second half, from the primary documents, with every claim traceable.