Predictably the question has hurt Britain's national pride - particularly when the British believe their old rivals France are leading the push to change from GMT to the new time standard.

"We understand that in Britain they have a sense of loss for GMT," said Elisa Felicitas Arias, director of the time department at the France-based International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), which pushed for the change.

GMT is based on the passage of the Sun over the zero meridian line at the Greenwich Observatory in southeast London, and became the world standard for time at a conference in Washington in 1884.

France had lobbied for Paris Mean Time at the same conference.

In 1972 it was replaced in name by Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) but that essentially remained the same as GMT.

UTC is based on about 400 atomic clocks at laboratories around the world but then corrected with "leap seconds" to align itself with the Earth's rotational speed, which fluctuates.

Tiny variations

But the tiny variations between Earth speed and atomic speed have become a problem for GPS, the global positioning systems and mobile phone networks on which the modern world relies.

"These networks need to be synchronised to the millisecond," Dr Arias said.

"We are starting to have parallel definitions of time. Imagine a world where there were two or three definitions of a kilogram."

【格林尼治时间或被原子时取代】相关文章：

★ 成都富士康爆炸已致2死16伤

★ BBC推荐：7月份最精彩的四部电影

★ 豆瓣9.4的《杀死伊芙》回归,网上一片好评

★ Johnny Depp德普叔经典语录大集合

★ 不放弃的人才会被幸运眷顾

★ NASA将向公众开放国际空间站 每人每晚3.5万美元

★ 简历写作：万人之上的简历是如何炼成的

★ 2019年度最佳饮食

★ BEC商务英语考试初级写作模拟题讲解

★ 印度的奇观垃圾山越来越大了，飞机都怕