That's a great example of how even some of the most influential minds are fallible. Lamport is sort of the god of distributed systems, having invented vector clocks, paxos which is how there is any sanity in modern data centers (chubby, ZK, etcd, etc... are based on the core ideas of this), TLA+ for reasoning about correctness, so much great stuff. Check out some of these! http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

Amazing work :-)

That's Leslie Lamport, winner of the 2013 Turing Award.

Even the best scientists are not machines. It is naïve to think that the best papers are flawless. (I used to think so when starting grad school.) They is not.

I should admit that after writing this, I went back and forth with him over email and he convinced me he was right, after all.

That continuity assumption he made is there in Newtonian Mechanics and other very widely accepted models. Something just feels off about the whole assumption. maybe I spent too much time with digital computers. Those models have a hard time explaining the non-reversibility of time also.