Timekeeping and Technology
I'm reading Einstein in Love by Dennis Overbye. It's an excellent, surprisingly somewhat addictive, account of Einstein's teen's, 20's, and 30's. Overbye does a great job of discussing Einstein and the great physics problems of that time - very accessible.
Anyhoo, a huge problem of that time was clock synchronization. The excerpt below is from the book:
Recently, work by the Harvard University historian of science, Peter Galison has established that the synchronization of clocks over long distances and far-flung networks was one of the key technological goals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe. How could the trains run on time without a way for everybody to agree on what time it actually was.
Well guess what? In the twenty-first century clock synchronization is still a very significant issue. I have bumped into it many times during my 12 years at GCI. Telecommunications and computers are all about keeping hundreds of devices from routers to 5ESS telephony switches to Sun Servers to SS7 STP's synchronized. And it's much more difficult than you might think:
-
-
The devices then all need to be set to the correct time.
-
Devices' internal clocks have a tendancy to wander. So they require resetting.
-
Even though items 1, 2, and 3 sound simple, they are not. All rely upon people to actually agree upon procedures then follow them. That is where most of the problems occur:
-
People either set the clocks to the time on their wristwatch or they don't set the clocks at all.
-
Different departments have different procedures for clock synchronization.
-
People may originally set a device clock but then never bother to reset it. So it can wander and be off by as much as an hour.
-
And let's not even talk about the switch from standard time to daylight savings time. It's a semi-annual dance of potential disaster. More than once, our device clocks have been set either two hours ahead or two hours behind. Once, one of our switch clocks was set to the date of 2015. Fixing those call records was a real chore.
The reason I bring this up is that this morning we were discussing this very issue. We're having synchronization issues with a major cross departmental platform we're turning up. It's not a technical challenge - it's a people challenge. We have to decide how we're going to synchronize. It's actually a significant issue.
And it's such serendipidty since I just read the relevant passage in Einstein in Love last night.
8:53:16 PM 
|
