If a mysterious force secretly changed EVERY clock worldwide one minute forward, how long would it take until people notice, and how would people/governments react?
Every single clock, even those that are air gapped. Countdown timers lose a minute, stopwatches add a minute. Biological clocks aren't affected.
People who look at timestamped data would notice immediately. Server logs, transaction logs, etc would all be missing a minute's worth of data. Things that take a known amount of time would not be completed on time. Trains would be late, burritos would be under-microwaved, satellites would be in unexpected positions, etc. So some people would notice instantly, some may not notice at all.
“At least, that’s what everyone thought…”
movie begins
A lot of software is reliant on very precise timing. The world at large would notice immediately due to the many disconnects, glitches, bugs, desyncs, not to say anything of all the physical processes controlled by machines going wrong. As a simple example consider an industrial oven (or any process really) that is programmed to shut down at 4:39:20 but at 4:39:15 the 1 minute skip happens. An airplanes auto pilot that is suddenly missing the last minute of sensor data to. base its micro steering on. Any big internet service that has to deal with thousands to millions of clients trying to reconnect at once because their previous connection timed out. Bad stuff.
This would be immediate world wide chaos and likely panic as the cause for all the chaos would be unknown and forever would be. Economic crash likely.
Think of all the attention and effort the year 2k problem got, but this one is worse and there is no prep whatsoever.
Most of those problems would solve itself though. Things would just happen a minute too early, which might cause chaos for an hour or so, but overall nothing too serious. But IT people all over the world would try to find out how that mysterious gap in their logs and data happened for weeks afterwards.
Astronomers would notice immediately, as the stars would be in very wrong positions. The IAU is the primary reason why IT people have to hack around leap seconds.
wouldn’t it be noticed immediately since space satellites would be out of sync, and GPS locations wouldnt be accurate etc?
presuming worldwide = earth
Yeah but they said all clocks so all the sats would still be in sync just like we had a leep second it would just be a leep minute.
The GPS almanac is a table of the exact orbital information of every satellite. Every receiver needs a copy of the almanac to understand where the satellites are supposed to be, so that it can determine where it is in relation to those satellites.
When their clocks all shift one minute simultaneously, the almanac isn't updated. Every satellite is 60 seconds away from where the almanac says it should be.
If the satellites were geostationary, receivers would still work, they'd just be off by 0.25 degrees of longitude as the entire constellation would be shifted the same amount. But the GPS constellation consists of satellites in a variety of inclined orbits. Nothing is where the almanac thinks it is, and nothing is where it is supposed to be in relation to anything else.
Parent comment is correct: GPS will immediately fail, and remain down until an updated almanac is published and distributed.
Satellites aren’t world wide, they’re world orbiting.
Came here to say this. Hopefully the systems in place are resilient enough to handle a leap minute (especially since they already exist), but it would definitely cause some instant issues.
The average person probably wouldn’t notice, but anyone working with time sensitive equipment would.
Do leap minutes really exist? I've never heard of that before? I don't think we've ever had 60 leap seconds since the inception of the idea.
Its ambiguous to see how different people interpret it. My thought when I typed the question was that anything that is closer to Earth than the moon is considered part of "World Wide", but I can see how some people would interpret satelites are not part of "World Wide".
1 minute, 60 seconds, 60 thousand milliseconds. I work with computer systems that monitor themselves to make sure they don't take more than 10 milliseconds. At 50 milliseconds, they would raise alarms.
It takes 100 milliseconds to blink.
So, we'd notice pretty much immediately :)
And then all networked computers that assume a response within 30 seconds would go bonkers and maybe need to be restarted.
I'd react by assuming IT misconfigured the Network Time Protocol service that keeps machine clocks synced and inform them.
I still come across DCs where time drift happens because of poorly configured VMs
Thousands of exhibits showing how sundials work, or how any other non-clock time-keeping mechanisms work, would immediately reveal something is amiss.
The number of people that would set their microwave timer for 1 minute at that exact moment and see that it finished and see that it was 2 minutes later would be significant.
The number of text conversations where people send half sentences constantly, time logs.
Any chatrooms chat logs. Just all suddenly missing a minute. During heated debates.
There are so many non-clock related instances of time tracking that exist within rigid time frames, globally...
Youd have dozens of social media posts showing the same anomaly. At the same time.
I give it ~3-4 hours before it is trending globally, maximum.
We still haven’t found the 297 years from the Middle Ages.
Around 1000AD there were no real clocks yet though. Spring driven clocks appeared in the 1500's and pendulum clocks in 1656
Since we're speaking in pure hypotheticals here:
I would just go back and fix the clocks. Every single one of them.
Shouldn't take more than a minute
Others have good answers. My only answer is I sure as hell wouldn't notice. I swear, I blink and several minutes seem to pass. Ugh.
Oh but one point, when I and others do notice (or rather, are told by smarter people), you sure as hell better believe people are going to be researching and trying to figure out how the fuck that happened. Could change how we conceptualize the time dimension forever.