Ephemeris-Free Phase-Consensus Time
0. Introduction
The Shunyaya Symbolic Mathematical Clock (SSM-Clock) recognizes “clock time” tau_hat_days directly from instantaneous phases of a few known rhythms (e.g., day, week, lunar, solar). It solves a single scalar objective over circular residuals using a small coarse grid followed by a derivative-free refine (no gradients). There is no wall clock, no ephemeris, no network. Everything is plain ASCII and audit-ready: a tiny frozen manifest + a one-line objective + a pocket calculator for quick offline checks.
Key questions at a glance
- What if minutes-level “clock time” could be recognized on-device from a tiny, audit-ready kernel — with no wall clock, no ephemeris — and remain stable across days to thousands of years?
- Can a tiny, transparent manifest + one-line rule recover “now” to minutes, even across days to thousands of years? -> Yes. Freeze a small ASCII manifest of cycles and minimize a single scalar objective
E(t); stacked snapshots + multistart refine keep the correct valley even when the horizon spans very long ranges. - Can timekeeping survive drift, missing timestamps, no internet, and no ephemeris, purely from rhythms? -> Yes. The Shunyaya Symbolic Mathematical Clock uses only instantaneous phases of known cycles; stacking across rhythms suppresses aliases, so recognition remains offline and robust.
- Can anyone audit it end-to-end in plain ASCII — portable, private, auditable by design? –> Yes. Manifests, formulas, and CLI are plain ASCII; the objective is one line and deterministic, so results are easy to reproduce, inspect, and govern.
- Can we set timers/alarms without wall-time — purely symbolically? -> Yes. SSM-Wait treats
wait N minutesasadvance by Delta_tau >= N/1440 days, tails a live tau stream, unwraps across the modulo horizon(T_search), and fires deterministically offline. Wrap-safe, ephemeris-free, and validated with 3-min and 5-min waits using the same inverse. - Can it be tested offline in minutes — from a single script, with no CSVs? -> Yes. A pocket calculator (
ssm_clock_calc.py) is bundled for quick checks:T_search, model phases att, residualsE(t), circular error, and features.
0.1 One-line objective (pure ASCII)
Minimize the stacked circular residual energy:
E(t) = sum_k [ wrap180( (b0_k + w_k*t) - phi_k_obs_deg ) ]^2
Return:
tau_hat_days = argmin_t E(t) (mod T_search)
with a confidence score:
Z in [0,1]
Navigation
Next: SSM-Clock—Mechanics & Capabilities (0.2, 0.3)
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