What is time?

“What is time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What, then, is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want explain it to an inquirer, I do not know” lamented Augustine in Anno Domino 340.

Six hundred years earlier, Aristotle cut to the chase in his Physics “First, does time belong to the class of things that exist or to that of things that do not exist? Then secondly, what is its nature?” Is it even real, he wondered. And if it is, is time absolute, as Newton proposed, or relative, as Einstein argued?

Or, should we simply stop worrying altogether, and settle for probably the only way humanly possible: to describe time through a metaphor; to accept it as flow of a river, or something that stands still like a moment between two hearth beats, that flies like an arrow, freezes like ice, runs out like sand, cuts short, or like love, last for eternity?

“My watch no longer keeps time”, he said.

It never had.                       

Time keepers and Time wasters

All watches and clocks in my workshop, including the most expensive mechanical timepieces worth many thousands of dollars, are set to correct time by my master clock - an inexpensive battery-operated Swiss junket carriage clock in a rather ugly case. This unattractive little quartz clock amazingly keeps excellent time - I only have to reset it twice a year when daylight savings kick in.

In recent years, I have found myself setting watches against my personal computer(PC) clock. I am obviously aware that my PC clock is not a standard benchmark for this purpose as it is often many seconds away from the exact time (sometimes even a minute or two) but for customers, this is rarely a problem. A small portion of picky customers would set their watches to radio signal time; nevertheless, the rest could not care less.

Today, my assistant Denis arrived late for work and blamed my computer, giving me a "it's your fault" excuse. He also pointed out that all the 3 PCs in the office set are on different time, as well as his watch and two mobile phones. Obviously, it was time to get our clocks on time.
A quick google search for 'atomic clock' lead to the World Timeserver. According to the website description, "Atomic Clock Synchronisation is the best way to make this happen". Sounds just right! So I clicked on the link
http://www.worldtimeserver.com/atomic-clock/

The Atomic Clock Sync v3.0 has a very intuitive and smooth installation process and a few seconds later, I was ready to press the Sync Now button.


However, this seemed too good to be true and I got the following error message on my screen:
"Unable to connect to RPC server".
What a bummer!

So, until we get a grasp of what the RPC server is, we will continue to set our timepieces against our trustworthy Swiss junket clock. And Denis has been asked to set his watch 5 minutes fast, just in case.