> As "idealized physical time" itself does not have consistent ordering, surely this is impossible in real life?
It's possible when you have reliable clocks to provide time bounds, and knowledge of the physical system to provide space bounds to permit clock synchronisation to some accuracy.
If two external agents make requests that conflict or interact (aka are non-commutative), if the requests are close enough in time and separate enough in space, the lack of true global time (ie. relativity) means there will be no physically unambiguous order to the requests.
But you can delay the responses to non-commutative requests for long enough to impose an unambiguous global order on any external logic that depends on information in the response.
In effect, the "global time" of external agents events isn't a function of the instant when they make a request, it is an ordering function of the both the request and response events, which makes each external request take a time range physically. The ranges are managed to ensure there is a global order to any possible information dependencies the external agents may be using. In a way, this is a neat optimisation of vector logical clocks while maintaining the logic, reducing the dimensionality of the vector. This can be generalised in large distributed systems to partial dimension reduction.
When the system has clocks that are synchronised across the internal system to some accuracy, "close enough in time" can be resolved more accurately, and the required delays to disambiguate requests that are close together in time can be reduced.
It is possible Spanner might develop an inconsistency near the event horizon of a black hole. Something to watch out for.