Proceedings of the Symposium on the Rotation of the Earth and Atomic Time Standards: Part II. The rotation of the earth: The irregular rotation of the earth

. A mechanical explanation of the observed irregular rotation of the surface of the earth is proposed. From this probabilistic model the correlations between the apparent fluctuations of the motion of the moon in successive years are derived and a modified least-square method is developed for finding the secular accelerations of sun and moon.