24 papers
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…
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…