Civilization maintains an elaborate infrastructure devoted to the maintenance of synchronized time. Governments mandate daylight saving time. Standards bodies insert leap seconds into Coordinated Universal Time. Engineers debate leap milliseconds and leap nanoseconds. The Global Positioning System applies relativistic corrections at the nanosecond level. All of these adjustments attempt to preserve an assumption: that a single global time exists and that clocks can be made to agree upon it. This paper argues that this assumption constitutes a category mistake in the sense of Ryle (1949). We show that special and general relativity prohibit absolute simultaneity, that the one-way speed of light is conventionally defined rather than measured, and that recent experiments on indefinite causal order demonstrate nature admits correlations with no well-defined temporal sequence. We trace the consequences of this category mistake through distributed computing, where it manifests as the Forward-In-Time-Only (FITO) assumption that underlies Lamport's logical clocks (1978), the impossibility results of Fischer-Lynch-Paterson (1985), and the CAP theorem (2000). From this perspective, daylight saving time and leap seconds are not corrections to time but corrections to conventions -- they sharpen the guillotine of synchronization in preparation for executing something that does not exist.

翻译：人类文明维持着复杂的同步时间基础设施。政府强制推行夏令时，标准机构在协调世界时中插入闰秒，工程师们争论着毫秒级与纳秒级的闰步。全球定位系统在纳秒量级应用相对论修正。所有这些调整都试图维系一个假设：存在一个统一的全球时间，并且钟表能够就此达成一致。本文论证，这一假设构成了赖尔（1949）意义上的范畴错误。我们指出：狭义与广义相对论禁止绝对同时性；光速的单向性为约定而非测量所得；近期关于不定因果序的实验表明，自然界允许存在无明确时间序列的关联。我们追溯这一范畴错误在分布式计算领域的后果：它表现为支撑Lamport逻辑时钟（1978）的"仅向前时间"假设、Fischer-Lynch-Paterson不可能性结论（1985）以及CAP定理（2000）。由此视角观之，夏令时与闰秒并非对时间的修正，而是对约定的修正——它们磨砺着同步的铡刀，准备斩向一个本不存在之物。