This isn't a coincidence. Vector clocks, roughly speaking, build upon the idea of Lamport Clocks. This isn't to say that one type of clock is better than the o

This isn't a coincidence. Vector clocks, roughly speaking, build upon the idea of Lamport Clocks. This isn't to say that one type of clock is better than the other. The choice between them depends on the task at hand and involves a set of trade-offs. Anyway, Leslie Lamport, who is considered the founding father of distributed systems as we know them today, introduced the concept of Lamport Clocks in his 1978 paper "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system" (for which he later won the Turing Award). According to Lamport, that paper was directly inspired by the special theory of relativity. In his own words [^1]: "[...] special relativity, in particular, the four-dimensional space-time view developed by Minkowski in the famous 1908 paper. I realized that the problems in distributed systems are very much analogous to what's going on in physics [...]" So, I don't know if these algorithms were reinvented or (re)discovered because, as you rightly say, they happen to operate in our universe. [^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRouGH0oMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRouGH0oMg"