On New Year’s Eve at 6:59:59 p.m. ET, an “international consortium of timekeepers” will add one second to the world’s clock. How do you get to be an official timekeeper?
Earn a Ph.D. in astronomy and move to France. Tweaks to the official clock are announced by the Earth Orientation Center, a Paris-based subunit of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.
Well, no. That’s how you get to make the decision of when to add a leap second. But the IERS is not the official timekeeper, that’s the BIPM, who calculate the atomic time scale TAI and the coordinated universal time scale UTC. Countries that contribute to the international standard realize their own versions of these time scales.
In the US, there aren’t a lot of places where you can learn to be a timekeeper. Contrary to the article’s suggestion, your best bet is probably a degree in atomic physics or math, depending on whether you want to work on hardware or on the timescale algorithms, and then apply for a job at USNO or NIST.