Life, Time and Kerberos Servers II

Part 2: Time

Before you plunge into the madness that is this post, answer me this: “What time is it right now?”


If you’re just continuing to read this without bothering about the question, then shame on you for spoiling my upcoming AHA moment! And if you did bother to glance at the bottom-right of your screen or any other device purported to “give the time”, then AHA! You have just fallen victim to one of the biggest scams of human civilization. Because time, my friend <cue dramatic music>, is an illusion!

What’s that I see on clocks and other tick-tocky things then, you ask! Good question! But ask yourself this – what is time? A 4th dimension, arbitrary numbers, a calibration of human events? Yes, yes, you nod – all that stuff! Ah, but these are mere slippery definitions – and if you have consulted lawyers of the highest caliber (as I have), they will agree that they are circumstantial at best to prove that time exists. Can you really answer the question – “What time is it now?” without referring to some sort of relative reference (like the number of seconds since 1970, which begets the question – when was 1970!)?

Heck, look at the things we do to keep up the fragile illusion of time! There’s the poor international date-line which is tugged and twisted until it looks the frantic readings of a heart monitor. The unfortunate inhabitants of Kiribati used to switch days while walking across the island – until they decided in 1995(which half’s 1995 you may ponder) that enough was enough and started following the same time. Israel demands by law that summer last 150 days, though I’m not sure if rogue seasons have been prosecuted. And in the pre-recession era, how unnatural was it to land before you started on a trans-Atlantic Concorde flight!

Worst of all we’ve set up institutions to keep the farce going! Ft. Collins, Colorado burps radio signals at regular intervals so that the world can synchronize to the “right time” known as UTC. But they couldn’t even figure out what to name it! The English abbreviation for coordinated universal time would be CUT, while in French it would be TUC. The military was like, “Screw you guys!” and went ahead and called it Zulu time, which made a few tribes in Africa really happy until they realized it was just a phonetic placeholder for the letter Z. And even if you ignore the atrocities in appellation and shakily point out that the array of NIST’s 300 atomic clocks can’t possibly be propounding a myth, Einstein will rise out of his grave - his silvery locks waving grandly as he punches you for being ignorant of his famous time-dilation hypothesis in which he proposed that the flow of time depended on how fast you were zooming relative to someone else.

And all of this for what?! The wars, the death and destruction, the pain and suffering induced by a charade! Think of all the poor eastern Kiribatians who lost their jobs because they were always accused of being a day late to every meeting! The miserable students of distributed computing who have to read through reams of encyclopedic books on synchronizing algorithms while wading through shocking terms like vector time-stamps and Lamport’s logical clocks. Feel for the Zulu tribesmen forced to live by South African Standard Time instead of Zulu time. Think of poor Bert who stayed back on Earth and aged 50 years while his gallivanting twin brother Al took off on a round-trip to the Alpha-3 star system nearly at the speed of light, only to return half-a-year older.

And it’s not like you haven’t fallen victim to this illusion! As probably every student will tell you, there’s an uncanny way how you barely drop dead on your bed that your alarm starts ringing almost immediately. It’s like Time was waiting stealthily for you to fall asleep and then decided to zoom ahead when you weren’t paying attention. And its tricks don’t stop there! Oh no! So many innocent souls have fallen into the snooze-warp wormhole, never to recover fully. It’s a little known fact, closely guarded by the world’s top physicists, but research has shown that after the snooze button has been pressed five times, a temporary warp occurs in the space-time continuum, known as the Snooze Criticality or SC. At the SC, one wrong move can change everything: a grudging upwards motion directed towards getting up causes the wormhole to close and to the casual observer it would seem nothing significant has occurred. However, (and this is where many people have not survived), a curling motion sideways with all the good intentions of getting up in the next five minutes causes the wormhole to gape and the timeline splits. You wake up barely “2 minutes” later, but half the day has gone and you sit staring at the time, wondering what happened. What you can’t see is the faint snicker as Time stares back!

You have been warned – and perhaps this message will limit the chaos that a fickle illusion has inflicted upon us. Before signing off, here’s a pretty profound line from a lawyer friend of mine that I think best describes the reason why the myth has remained: “The reason we have time," he said, "is because we have memories”. Think about it.