A Clock Made of Relations
Alexander Parnell · VektorGeist · 2026-08-13 · preprint, not peer reviewed
Whether the time a process has lived can be computed from its own internal relations rather than read off an external clock. The first version measured duration as arc length, failed a sampling test, and blamed the coastline problem — an attribution this paper shows was too broad: correct about arc length, and not a verdict on the question. The construction given here clears four of its five pre-registered criteria, including two the first version could not clear even in principle, and still fails the fifth, which is stated plainly rather than worked around. Thirteen intermediate attempts traced what looked like a structural obstruction; it turned out to be an artifact of a single one-sided nonlinearity, and removing it dissolved the whole axis.
Read the paper — 10.5281/zenodo.21861429
Open access under CC-BY-4.0. The DOI above is a concept DOI: it always resolves to the newest version.
Nothing here has been reproduced independently, outside the project that produced it. Every paper says so. Every page of the record says so. That is the ceiling on all of it, and it does not move until someone outside repeats the measurements.