git/list[1] front-page[2] threads[3] people[4] search[5] about
 

Re: git and time

From
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date
Sep 28, 2006, 16:53 UTC
Message-ID
<Pine.LNX.4.64.0609280949030.3952@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To
<d620685f0609271749p30da81d6p25cb759bf793d327@mail.gmail.com>
On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, apodtele wrote:
>
> Shall we summarize? Time is a very important concept in physics.

Actually, even in physics (or very _much_ in physics), time doesn't follow the nice procession that Matthew is kind of asking for.

In physics, particles can go backwards in time or forwards in time (the _likelihood_ that a photon moves at exactly the speed of light is higher, but on a quantum scale, strange things happen).

And everybody should by now know what relativity says: time does not impose an "ordering" of events outside of the so-called "cone of light". There is only an ordering imposed by _causality_, not by time.

That, btw, is very similar to git. The only _true_ ordering in git is causality. Time itself tends to have certain properties that makes it _look_ like it is about causality, but in real life there is just a strong correlation.

Nature is sometimes stranger than our everyday experiences would have us believe. And "time" is a hell of a lot more complicated than just a global one-dimensional entity, steadily ticking away.

			Linus
Previous: apodtele
Message 2 of 2 in “Re: git and time”
  1. apodteleSep 28, 2006
  2. Linus TorvaldsSep 28, 2006

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.