On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 03:15:57PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote: > I don't know why anyone thought the speed of light had anything to do
Maybe you should read up on general relativity. > with this problem. The lamp can be at a single point and so can its A geometrical point has zero length and width and hence has no existence in the real universe. The Planck time quantum defines the smallest meaningful parcel of spacetime. At our current level of knowledge an oscillator takes a lot more resources than that to implement, and hence is huge in comparison. > switch. Since nothing has to travel between switching events the > speed of light is not relevant. By present theories the shortest An abstract clock has no existance. An implementation of a clock has physical extent, a cycle time, and a measurement process to go along with it. All of those are relativistically/quantum constrained. > meaningful time interval is on the order of the Planck time ~10^-43 > sec which depends on the gravitational constant and Planck's constant > as well as the speed of light. Right. Given the speed of light, and the duration of Planck time quantum you can see the ultimate resolution level of a clock. The meaning of change of state ceases to exist once you go below that. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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