Time as Synchronisation

A Nature article (here) portrays time as a kind of cosmic metronome: a shared beat that must remain in perfect sync between Hilbert space and 3D space, or between histories and measurements. Even when general relativity undermines the possibility of global synchronisation, the assumption persists — time must be something like a clock, ticking away identically across all layers of description.

This metaphor of synchronisation suggests that time is an external standard, a ruler against which the universe must keep pace. It reduces temporal unfolding to the mechanics of keeping in step, as though the cosmos were a choir following a conductor’s baton.

Relationally, however, time is not synchronisation but ordering. What we call “time” is the structured potential of sequences within relational processes. Cuts do not align themselves to a universal clock; they carve temporal orderings relative to the perspective enacted. There is no master beat, only locally instantiated rhythms of relation.

The insistence on synchronisation hides the reflexive fact that the very notion of “keeping time” is a symbolic imposition, born of our cultural technologies of measurement. When physics speaks as if reality itself must follow these conventions, it mistakes our tools for the structure of being.

The effect is a double distortion: it presents temporal order as external and uniform, and it conceals the perspectival nature of temporal construal. A relational ontology resists this reduction. Time is not the synchronisation of clocks, nor the ticking of an absolute metronome, but the patterned unfolding of relations, cut differently according to the vantage taken.