Comment by deepsun
13 hours ago
> not necessarily exactly equal to the time
I believe it was Poincare who has proven that it's even theoretically impossible to synchronize clocks exactly.
13 hours ago
> not necessarily exactly equal to the time
I believe it was Poincare who has proven that it's even theoretically impossible to synchronize clocks exactly.
It's not impossible at all, you just need to agree on a reference frame. Which is not hard to do when you're sitting on a planet.
And with computers it's fussy to get clocks synchronized below a millisecond but not that fussy. You can keep a single computer synchronized down to a single cycle, making timestamps effectively perfect across different parts of it. And then between computers, if you have n latency between them you should be able to get the clocks within n/10, which might as well be perfect for coordination purposes.
Wasn't that Einstein with special relativity?
Einstein read Poincare papers for sure, and realized that assembling all those pieces together turns the physics upside down. But many of the results of the special relativity were well known before. For example, the great Michelson–Morley experiment was conducted in 1887, 18 years before. Einstein was the first to realize that all the pieces form a totally new puzzle.