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Originally Posted by Pyrotex
Clocks count their incremental changes of internal state.
We have lots of machines, simple machines not computers, that can "count".
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Strictly speaking, a machine doesn't 'do' anything,
we say that it does, that a clock "keeps time"; this is a figure of speech, since obviously clocks don't keep anything. except they keep
going (perhaps).
If you build a "time-keeping" device, you mean it will have a certain regular motion (a pendulum swinging, say) and you can construct a 'counter' to accumulate each regular transition, and
leave the device calculating its time-integral.
But if you never "measure" the output, the device won't 'do' anything, since the purpose of the thing, is to collect time, and let you see the result - seeing the result is required, for the device to work as intended.
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Clocks count time. They do not interpret what it "means".
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There you go.
