5 citations · 8 across the 26 of their papers we have counts for
24 papers · 2 filters
Engineered Simultaneity: The Physical Impossibility of Consolidated Price Discovery Across Spacelike-Separated Exchanges
Paul Borrill
We define \emph{engineered simultaneity}: the construction of a system that requires temporal comparison of events at spacelike-separated locations, implements this comparison via…
Why Synchronized Time is a Fiction: Daylight Saving Time, Leap Seconds, and the Guillotine Sharpened for Nothing
Paul Borrill
Civilization maintains an elaborate infrastructure devoted to the maintenance of synchronized time. Governments mandate daylight saving time. Standards bodies insert leap seconds i…
The Forward-In-Time-Only Assumption in SmartNIC Resource Management: A Critique of Wave and the Case for Bilateral Interaction
Paul Borrill
The datacenter industry is converging on SmartNIC-based resource management. Wave (Humphries et al., ASPLOS '25) demonstrates the practical feasibility of offloading kernel thread…
The Markovianity of Time: The Category Mistake in Open Quantum Systems
Paul Borrill
The Markov approximation is arguably the most ubiquitous tool in physics, underpinning quantum master equations, stochastic processes, and -- via Shannon's channel model and Lampor…
Subtime: Reversible Information Exchange and the Emergence of Classical Time
Paul L. Borrill
We formalize the concept of subtime -- a reversible mode of information interchange within entangled systems -- and show how classical time emerges as an asymptotic limit through d…
Link Wars: The Semantic Crisis. Is the debate over or is it just beginning?
Paul Borrill
For fifty years, networking has fragmented whenever new workloads exposed hidden assumptions about time, ordering, failure, and trust. This paper argues that the current interconne…
Why iCloud Fails: The Category Mistake of Cloud Synchronization
Paul Borrill
iCloud Drive presents a filesystem interface but implements cloud synchronization semantics that diverge from POSIX in fundamental ways. This divergence is not an implementation bu…
Background and Intellectual Development: Supplementary Material for the Category Mistake Papers
Paul Borrill
This supplement documents the intellectual trajectory that led to the Category Mistake framework and the Forward-In-Time-Only (FITO) analysis presented in our recent arXiv papers.…
The Semantic Arrow of Time, Part V: The Leibniz Bridge -- Toward a Unified Theory of Semantic Time
Paul Borrill
This is the final paper in the five-part series The Semantic Arrow of Time. Part I identified the FITO category mistake -- treating forward temporal flow as sufficient for establis…
The Semantic Arrow of Time, Part IV: Why Transactions Fail
Paul Borrill
This is the fourth of five papers comprising The Semantic Arrow of Time. Parts I-III established that computing's hidden arrow of time is semantic rather than thermodynamic, that b…
The Semantic Arrow of Time, Part III: RDMA and the Completion Fallacy
Paul Borrill
This is the third of five papers comprising The Semantic Arrow of Time. Parts I and II identified computing's hidden semantic arrow of time, the FITO category mistake, and presente…
The Semantic Arrow of Time, Part II: The Semantics of Open Atomic Ethernet
Paul Borrill
This is the second of five papers comprising The Semantic Arrow of Time. Part I established that computing's arrow of time is semantic rather than thermodynamic, and that the Forwa…
Bisynchronous FIFOs and the FITO Category Mistake: Silicon-Proven Interaction Primitives for Distributed Coordination
Paul Borrill
Bisynchronous FIFOs -- hardware buffers that mediate data transfer between independent clock domains without a shared global timebase -- have been designed, formally verified, and…
Why Atomicity Matters to AI/ML Infrastructure: Snapshots, Firmware Updates, and the Cost of the Forward-In-Time-Only Category Mistake
Paul Borrill
Large-scale AI/ML training systems depend on two assumptions that are rarely examined: (1) that checkpoints represent atomic snapshots of global training state, and (2) that infras…
The Semantic Arrow of Time, Part I: From Eddington to Ethernet
Paul Borrill
This is the first of five papers comprising The Semantic Arrow of Time. The argument begins with a claim: computing's arrow of time is semantic, not thermodynamic. The direction in…
Message Passing Without Temporal Direction: Constraint Semantics and the FITO Category Mistake
Paul Borrill
Message passing is widely assumed to be a fundamental primitive of distributed systems. This paper argues that conventional message systems embed a category mistake: they misinterp…
Unix Tools and the FITO Category Mistake: Crash Consistency and the Protocol Nature of Persistence
Paul Borrill
Unix tools such as ls, cp, mv, and rename expose a filesystem abstraction that appears to present a single, authoritative state evolving through atomic transitions. This abstractio…
The Bilateral Efficiency of Ethernet: Recalibrating Metcalfe and Boggs After Fifty Years
Paul Borrill
In July 1976, Metcalfe and Boggs published their foundational paper on Ethernet in Communications of the ACM. Their efficiency model -- E = (P/C)/(P/C + W*T) -- measures the fracti…
The Ghost in the Datacenter: Link Flapping, Topology Knowledge Failures, and the FITO Category Mistake
Paul Borrill
A link changes state faster than knowledge of that change can reach every component that acts on it. During the interval in between, some observer operates on a topology that no lo…
Lamport's Arrow of Time: The Category Mistake in Logical Clocks
Paul Borrill
Lamport's 1978 paper introduced the happens-before relation and logical clocks, freeing distributed systems from dependence on synchronized physical clocks. This is widely understo…
Circumventing the CAP Theorem with Open Æthernet
Paul Borrill
The CAP theorem is routinely treated as a systems law: under network partition, a replicated service must sacrifice either consistency or availability. The theorem is correct withi…
Circumventing the FLP Impossibility Result with Open Atomic Ethernet
Paul Borrill
The Fischer--Lynch--Paterson (FLP) impossibility result is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental negative results in distributed computing: no deterministic protocol can g…
What Distributed Computing Got Wrong: The Category Mistake That Turned Design Choices into Laws of Nature
Paul Borrill
The foundational impossibility results of distributed computing -- the Fischer-Lynch-Paterson theorem, the Two Generals Problem, the CAP theorem -- are widely understood as discove…
The Category Mistake of Cislunar Time: Why NASA Cannot Synchronize What Doesn't Exist
Paul Borrill
In April 2024, the White House directed NASA to establish Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) by December 2026. The programme assumes that a unified time standard can be constructed by de…