Civilization maintains an elaborate infrastructure for synchronized time. Governments mandate daylight saving. Standards bodies insert leap seconds. GPS applies relativistic corrections at the nanosecond level. Engineers debate leap milliseconds. All of it assumes that a single global time exists and that clocks can be made to agree on it.
Borrill (arXiv:2603.19099) argues this assumption is a category mistake in Ryle's sense. Special and general relativity prohibit absolute simultaneity. The one-way speed of light is conventionally defined, not measured. Recent experiments on indefinite causal order show nature admits correlations with no well-defined temporal sequence. The infrastructure isn't correcting time. It's correcting a convention about time — and the corrections create the illusion that the thing being corrected is real.
The same category mistake propagates into distributed computing. Lamport's logical clocks, the FLP impossibility result, the CAP theorem — all embed the assumption that events have a global temporal order that systems should approximate. From Borrill's perspective, these aren't fundamental limitations of distributed systems. They're consequences of demanding a property that physics says doesn't exist.
Leap seconds sharpen the guillotine of synchronization in preparation for executing something that was never there.