The co-ordinated universal time, UTC exists by international agreement. In the 1960s lots of countries signed a treaty so that's the "authority" AIUI.
The treaty says everybody agrees that this new standard will try to track "solar time" which felt intuitively reasonable. They want something equivalent to the old GMT which was really based on solar time, except more modern. At first the idea was, well, we just work out how fast this damp rock spins more precisely and we can use that to ensure everything works forever.
More precise measurements of the damp rock showed that, annoyingly, Mother Nature did not provide the spinning rock as a precise clock, it spins slower and faster according to a huge number of variables and so the best we can do is measure the spinning against an actual clock. So, "Leap seconds" were born to meet that legal requirement to have UTC match the solar time.
The "leap hour" would likewise fulfil this requirement, just in a deliberately useless way because we actually do not care about precisely tracking solar time. If we did, almost every human in the world would be perpetually annoyed because of course our present system of "time zones" means on average we're at least 30 minutes wrong!
alt Hacker News
The co-ordinated universal time, UTC exists by international agreement. In the 1960s lots of countries signed a treaty so that's the "authority" AIUI.
The treaty says everybody agrees that this new standard will try to track "solar time" which felt intuitively reasonable. They want something equivalent to the old GMT which was really based on solar time, except more modern. At first the idea was, well, we just work out how fast this damp rock spins more precisely and we can use that to ensure everything works forever.
More precise measurements of the damp rock showed that, annoyingly, Mother Nature did not provide the spinning rock as a precise clock, it spins slower and faster according to a huge number of variables and so the best we can do is measure the spinning against an actual clock. So, "Leap seconds" were born to meet that legal requirement to have UTC match the solar time.
The "leap hour" would likewise fulfil this requirement, just in a deliberately useless way because we actually do not care about precisely tracking solar time. If we did, almost every human in the world would be perpetually annoyed because of course our present system of "time zones" means on average we're at least 30 minutes wrong!