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Who will own the measure of our days?
It is New Year's Eve, 2005, and the night sky above the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., is crisp and clear. On this moonless evening-the second new moon of the month-all that is white stands out against the blackness: the stars, the stark white dome of the observatory itself, the huge discs of the satellite dishes nearby, the muted shadow of the vice president's residence (built in 1893 to house the observatory's superintendent, and now reportedly one of the few intentionally obscured spots in Google Earth's view of Washington). On a rooftop adjacent to the observatory stands a pole holding a metal Time Ball, ancestor of the glittering Waterford Crystal ball that in a few hours will ceremoniously descend in New York City's Times Square. The Naval Observatory's Time Ball was the first such device in the United States, and beginning in 1845 it dropped every day precisely at noon. Its signal informed all of Washington, and all the ships on the Potomac, and soon afterward the entire country, of the precise time by which to set their clocks and chronometers, in order to accurately determine their position by the stars. The Naval Observatory has been telling the nation-and now the world-precisely what time it is ever since.
Inside one of the observatory's more humble spaces, a rabbit's warren of 1960s-vintage fluorescent-lit hallways and offices called the Time Service Building, time is being tracked more exactly than ever before in human history. What must have seemed like astonishing accuracy in the day of the Time Ball (to a few tenths of a second) has given way to the pinpointing of a billionth of a second, an unimaginable unit called the nanosecond. Amidst that exactitude, however, on this New Year's evening a glitch is about to occur-a carefully planned, elaborately executed glitch that nonetheless has time directors, or time managers, as they're sometimes called, from Tokyo to Paris to Cairo sitting on the edge of their seats.
Here, in an unremarkable-looking hallway, a small crowd is beginning to gather-an incongruous mixture of full-dress Navy officers, khaki- and polo-shirt-clad technicians, and my guide for the evening, Dennis McCarthy, looking natty in a tuxedo (his ultimate destination tonight...