alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
orthoxerox • yesterday at 10:00 PM
Wasn't that Einstein with special relativity?
> 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.
Wasn't that Einstein with special relativity?
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.