Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events, dissected: an execution laid out in 3D with its logical clocks, vector clocks, every pair of events, the mutual exclusion algorithm and a physical-clock synchroniser, all computed live and checked against what really happened before what.
A complete, granular dissection of Lamport (1978). The paper's Figure 1, transcribed, or any seeded random execution is drawn on a 3D stage as a space-time diagram whose every event carries its Lamport clock and its vector clock as blocks of cells. Happened-before is computed from the graph alone, the Clock Condition and the vector clocks are checked against it on every pair, and the total order, the five-rule mutual exclusion algorithm, the anomaly of the telephone call, the Strong Clock Condition and the physical-clock theorem are each built out of the paper's own definitions. A 29-step article walks the camera through them with every figure from the paper traced to its sentence, then a research desk runs four seeded experiments, three of them pre-registered: how many concurrent pairs a Lamport clock silently orders as the message rate changes, how many entries a vector clock needs, how often the telephone-call anomaly occurs, and how tight the physical-clock bound is.
A space-time diagram on a table. Processes are columns, time runs up, and each event is a Lamport clock cell and a vector clock row whose heights are the values; messages are links. Up the table: matrices of every pair of events (what happened before what, what the clocks say, where they disagree), three request queues running the mutual exclusion algorithm, and five physical clocks with their offsets, skew and bound.
What is real. Everything on the stage is computed in the page by engine.js from the paper's rules IR1 and IR2, the five mutual exclusion rules, IR1' and IR2', and the vector clock rule. Happened-before is computed from the event graph alone, and test.mjs (8,000+ checks) compares it against a separate Floyd-Warshall closure, against hand-computed clock values and the paper's own statements about its Figure 1, the three mutual exclusion conditions on 360 simulated runs, and the physical-clock theorem on 288 runs. The paper's quotes come from the ACM printing, checked against its text and page images. The research desk is reproducible from research/.
