Turing Awardee Clips
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2024
7:27 · 24K views · Oct 30, 2020
A short clip from an ACM and Computer History Museum interview in which Leslie Lamport discusses writing his paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events. He explains its link to special relativity.
HN cites it as a primary source for Lamport's relativity inspiration behind logical clocks in distributed systems threads.
3 comments from Hacker News
The article itself isn't great, but it does briefly mention Leslie Lamport's 1978 paper "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System." In a 2016 interview, Lamport talked about his experience writing this paper and its association with special relativity. This short clip [0] from that interview is worth a watch. [0] this video
This isn't a coincidence. Vector clocks, roughly speaking, build upon the idea of Lamport Clocks. This isn't to say that one type of clock is better than the other. The choice between them depends on the task at hand and involves a set of trade-offs. Anyway, Leslie Lamport, who is considered the founding father of distributed systems as we know them today, introduced the concept of Lamport Clocks in his 1978 paper "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system" (for which he later won the Turing Award). According to Lamport, that paper was directly inspired by the special theory of relativity. In his own words [^1]: "[...] special relativity, in particular, the four-dimensional space-time view developed by Minkowski in the famous 1908 paper. I realized that the problems in distributed systems are very much analogous to what's going on in physics [...]" So, I don't know if these algorithms were reinvented or (re)discovered because, as you rightly say, they happen to operate in our universe. [^1]: this video "
Even with terrestrial applications that have very low clock skew, it can be very helpful to have a notion of which events could be effected by previous events and which couldn't have. But you're bang on the money with the physics analogy. Lamport himself says that his knowledge of special relativity helped him come up with the concept. this video