A friend and I were discussing this over a casual game the other day using an analogue clock. Back in the days before digital clocks, in a hall of say 150 boards, all with analogue clocks, would there be a point at which the clocks would somehow, via quantum mechanics perhaps, all come into synchronization with their ticking?
A sufficiently significant number will come into synchronization, yes. You can observe the same phenomenon at a stoplight with car blinkers.
Something like ||: TICK TICK TICK TICK ticka ticka ticka ticka TICK TICK TICK TICK ticka ticka ticka ticka :|| ?
What I notice, when there is ONE analog clock in the tournament room, is how annoying it is. In the olden times, all the analog clocks mushed together into one big sea of white noise, and it was kind of soothing.
Bill Smythe
Yep.
But it isn’t ALL of them synchronizing. It’s a “majority” (perhaps impacted by volume) - and the ones in the “in sync” group can be changing from moment to moment. When enough of them come in sync, we get the TICK TICK TICK TICK above, as enough leave the group, it becomes more quiet.
Synching Up Metronomes – not quite as loud but something like this 
On most of the BHB clocks, there were 120 ticks and 120 tocks per minute. That is, there were four swings (two swings in each direction) per second. So, with two clocks running, if there were always four TICKs, then four tickas, etc, that would mean that, while one clock was swinging 8 times, the other was swinging either 7 or 9 times. Thus, one clock or the other was running either 12.5 percent fast or 12.5 percent slow. (Or perhaps one was running 6 percent fast and the other 6.5 percent slow, or some other pair of numbers that adds up to 12.5.) That’s a total error of 7.5 minutes every hour between the two clocks. Wow.
Bill Smythe
A midi file using wood blocks as clocks Chess Clocks. Another factor is when someone moves and punches the clock, it may start too fast but will quickly slow down when the spring plate on the balance wheel moves off at an angle giving it an extra kick.
Only four TICKS and four tickas serves as an illustration only–with only two clocks it may take minutes to sync and unsync. In a room with twenty or more a handful may be in sync for a short while until some of them phase out.
Then I will bring an analog clock to the next tournament… 