You are right, of course. The text I quoted comes from the abstract. He articulates the same idea slightly differently on the second page: Time is no more de

You are right, of course. The text I quoted comes from the abstract. He articulates the same idea slightly differently on the second page: Time is no more defined by a clock than pressure is defined by a pressure gauge, speed by a speedometer, or gravity by a graded spring. Time is not defined by clocks. It is naturally fixed, manifest in motion, as with the celestial bodies. By defining time by his clocks, A. Einstein detached time from physical reality. He is saying that a clock only measures time; a clock is not time and does not define time. I agree with this. He is not saying celestial bodies are better clocks than atomic clocks. Because all clocks are oscillators. 'Time' is measured with an oscillator.* This oscillator can be a clock, celestial bodies, or atomic oscillators. They are oscillators with different oscillating mechanism and different periods. As he says, time is "manifest in motion" and what these oscillators measure is motion. We define the motion of the oscillator to be our unit motion and measure the other motion.* The count of oscillations is called 'time' but nothing about philosophical or physical time is revealed by these measurements of motion. That's why I said that Einstein, like all physicists, reifed 'time'. He thinks clocks (oscillators) define and measure something called 'time'. So, the correct way to state the relationship between gadgets we call clocks and 'time' is this: We don't know something called 'time' other than motion. Clocks are oscillators and they are used as unit oscillators to count how many times the motion to be measured occurs in the unit motion of the oscillator. What is measured is distance, ie. distance covered in unit motion of the oscillator. (Motion cannot be measured. What is measured is always distance.) I’m not sure what he means when he says that time “is naturally fixed.” * What is measured is distance, not time and not motion.