ubiquitin,
Your latest dissertation has added nothing to my already perfectly complete understanding of everything you have been saying. Unfortunately you still haven’t understood what I am trying to say. And in additiion, you have the concept of leap seconds EXACTLY BACKWARDS. I am apparently a worse teacher than you. I will try to improve. On your side please try to read slowly and carefully.
Chazal said that molad to molad is a certain time interval, equal to 29 and a half and 793/(1080*24) days or 2551443.3 seconds. The second then was defined as 1/86400 of a day. The days in their time were a certain length. But the length of the day has been changing due to the slowing of the rotation of the earth, while the molad to molad time has presumably remained constant – 2551443.3 of chazal’s seconds. Our clocks and watches have had their second hand tickings constantly adjusted throughout the centuries to stay 1/86400 of the current day. This is equivalent to sneakily adding thousands of leap seconds smeared out through the years, and has accumulated to about 3 hours.
What happened from the mid 20th century onwards (sort of, more or less, cutting through the confusion of various ideas and scales that were put forward), is that the second was redefined as a fixed amount of time based on a certain frequency of radiation from cesium atoms. Since the earth’s rotation continues to change, a fixed length of second comes with the disadvantage that mean midday will start to slowly move through the clockface to all kinds of ungodly hours. Thus leap seconds were introduced to keep clocks that are ticking with the new fixed second in sync with the sun.
Thus leap seconds do not, as you seem to think, adjust the natural mean solar time to conform with some arbitrary scale that the scientists came up with, on the contrary, it adjusts the arbitrary fixed second to conform with mean solar time.
So we come to the crux of the argument, which I’ll put in the form of a “mimah nafshach”:
If the factors affecting the rotation of the earth do not affect the molad to molad time, which remains a fixed 2551443.3 seconds of fixed length, then these seconds can only be those of the time of chazal, in which case 27 seconds are the least of our worries, as we have about three hours to consider.
If on the other hand we are not to take account of this discrepancy, either because lo nitnah torah lemalachei hashareis (it is impossible to know the discrepancy exactly without a large margin of error), or because some mysterious cosmic forces have been slowly changing the molad to molad time to keep it equal to chazal’s measure in contemporary days and seconds, THEN LEAP SECONDS ARE NOT TO BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT EITHER.
This is because leap seconds do the exact opposite of what you think. If chazal meant us to stay with mean solar time even though it is slowly changing, then the reforms in the definition of the second of the mid 20th century would mean that without leap seconds our clocks would slowly drift away from the correct time scale of chazal. The leap seconds actually bring the new fixed time scale of our clocks back to mean solar time.
So to recap, leap seconds are irrelevant, either we are three hours out, or we are right on time.